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AMERICAN POEMS. Representative Poems from the 
Works of Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, 
Lowell, and Emerson. With Biographical Sketches 
and Notes. i6mo, ^i.oo. 

Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 8vo, $2.50. 

AMERICAN PROSE. Selections from the Prose Writ- 
ings of Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, Whit- 
tier, Holmes, Lowell, Thoreau, and Emerson. 
With Introductions and Notes. i6mo, $1.00. 

Holiday Edition. With Portraits. 8vo, $2.50. 

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK. A Collection of the best 
Literature for Children. Illustrated. New Edition. 
4to, ^2.50. 

THE BOOK OF FABLES, chiefly from ^sop. Illus- 
trated. i6mo, 40 cents, net. 

THE BOOK OF FOLK STORIES. Illustrated. i6mo, 
60 cents. 

LIFE AND LETTERS OF BAYARD TAYLOR. Edited 
by Marie Hansen-Tavlor and Horace E. Scudder. 
With Portraits and Illustrations. 2 vols., crown 8vo, 
$4.00. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 

Boston and New York. 



MEN AND LETTERS 



ESSAYS IN CHARACTERIZATION 
AND CRITICISM 



BY 



HORACE E. SCUDDER 




„ ^ov^^ 1887 ' 



i 



'" ^ 



t 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



M DCCC LXXXVII 






-?^ ..^ 






Copyright, 1887, 
By HORACE E. SCUDDER. 

All rights reserved. 



^fHfi 



The "Riverside Press, Cambridge: 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



To 
HENRY MILLS ALDEN, 

DOCTOR OF LETTERS. 

My dear Alden, — 

In that former state of existence when we 
were poets, you wrote verses which I knew 
by heart and I read dreamy tales to you 
which you speculated over as if they were 
already classics. Then you bound your 
manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume 
and put it on the shelf, and I woke to find 
myself at the desk of a literary workman. 
We used to be told that seven years was 
the limit of personal integrity, but I believe 
the physiologists now refuse to let us be the 
same person for two consecutive breaths. 
Nearly four sevens of years have passed 
since we had daily and nightly companion- 
ship, and perhaps we ought to feel some 
hesitation in identifying ourselves with the 



IV TO HENRY MILLS ALDEN 

two young poets who walked Broadway and 
haunted little back rooms in Fourth Avenue 
and Eleventh Street; who had theories 
about Homer and discussed them in Har- 
lem ; who spent money before it was earned, 
and proposed the prudent course of retiring 
altogether upon an unexpected windfall of 
a hundred dollars, using the leisure thus 
happily secured for executing the epical 
work which required a continuity of time 
not easily had under customary conditions. 
It would be hard indeed if we were forced 
to tie those days to these by the brief notes 
and rare visits which have carelessly hap- 
pened between us. Let me rather think 
that Memory plays her part graciously and 
helps each to a proper sense of the other's 
past, when Consciousness takes a nap and 
refuses to respond readily to our call. I 
wonder if you are as reluctant to open that 
blue calf book as I to re-read certain early 
fancies of mine ? Yet I am credulous 
enough to think that the verses you wrote 
have re-sung themselves in that sympathetic, 



TO HENRY MILLS ALDEJST V 

patient, discriminating life whicli you have 
led as a literary judge, for I find myself 
curiously susceptible in my own work to 
certain influences which once shaped my 
thought into more creative form. 

Be this as it may, the friendliness which 
led you to listen to me when I had scarcely 
any other audience gives me some courage 
to come out from behind the screen of anon- 
ymity which has permitted me to work with 
freedom the past dozen years. At least I 
shall have one generous friend who will read 
what I have written because I wrote it, and 
that, I suppose, is the meaning of the per- 
sonal equation of which philosophers talk 
so sagely. Criticism, when anonymous, is 
still personal ; the critic is a person. But 
when he signs his name he introduces the 
other person, his double, himself reflected in 
the mind of his reader. My occupation has 
compelled me to print much comment upon 
contemporaneous literature ; fortunately, I 
have been able for the most part to work 
out of the glare of publicity. But there is 



VI TO HENRY MILLS ALDEN 

always that something in us whicli whispers 
jT, and after a while the anonymous critic 
becomes a little tired of listening to the 
whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed 
to escape from it by coming out into the 
light even at the risk of blinking a little, 
and by suffering the ghostly voice to become 
articulate, though the sound startle him. 
One craves company for his thought, and is 
not quite content always to sit in the dark 
with his guests. 

Accept then this little book, my dear 
Alden, and be my one reader, — surely that 
is the least return one can make for having 
a book dedicated to him, — and thus recover 
with me something of the illusion of days 
which were no better than these, not so good 
as they, we may each well think, but still 
days when the sun rose a little earlier and 
set a little later. 

Faithfully yours, 

H. E. SCUDDER. 

Cambridge, Mass., 

1 October, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



FAGB 

Elisha Mulford 1 

Longfellow and his Art .... 23 

A Modern Prophet ...... 70 

Landor as a Classic ..... 95 

Dr. Muhlenberg ....,,. 106 

American History on the Stage . -| » • 115 
The Shaping of Excelsior . . . . . 137 

Emerson's Self ....... 147 

Aspects of Historical Work . . . .171 

Anne Gilchrist . . . . . , . 195 

The Future of Shakespeare .... 215 



MEN AITD LETTEES. 



ELISHA MULFORD. 

It is a pity that some painter of insight 
and with skill of interpretation had not 
given us a portrait of Elisha Mulford, when 
he was in his full strength. It is an idle 
wish that art might find some means of per- 
petuating for us that most delicate organ of 
personality, the human voice. The painter, 
if he be given the precious power of seeing, 
can repair the waste of memory, and long 
after eyes have closed in death their power 
of appeal may dwell in some counterfeit pre- 
sentment of art ; but the lips have no lan- 
guage, and what musician has yet been able 
to recover for us the sound of a voice that is 
still? There is not a more lasting note of 
recognition between persons than the voice, 
which betrays the forgotten friend when the 
eye scans the face in vain for any trace of re- 
membered lineaments. It is the last, finest 
expression of the person, the most impossible 



2 MEN AND LETTERS 

to evade or simulate, the absolutely uncon- 
veyable. It was the misery of the poor old 
blind Isaac that he allowed himself to trust 
his sense of touch rather than his more un- 
erring sense of hearing. 

There are some natures that reveal them- 
selves with peculiar clearness through the 
voice, and Mulford was one of these. I can- 
not take up his books or one of his friendly 
letters without hearing that singularly rhyth- 
mical, harmonious utterance. In the pulpit, 
where he was rarely heard of late years, it 
fell into a somewhat monotonous series of 
cadences, due, very likely, to the physical 
exertion of a speaker who suffered from de- 
fective hearing ; but in conversation, his 
voice, low and even, swung in periods which 
were full of an incommunicable beauty. 
When he read aloud some favorite passage, 
one seemed to be listening to a sort of holy 
chant, and there are passages in The Repub- 
lic of God which sound in the ear like felici- 
tous renderings of some ancient Latin hymn 
of the church. It chanced to me to read 
this book on shipboard, and I found myself 
reading page after page in apparently per- 
fect agreement with the great metronome of 
the deep sea swell. 



ELI SEA MULFORD 3 

It is tlie rarity of Mulford's nature, find- 
ing an outlet in his voice and radiating from 
his person, which immediately addresses one 
who attempts to record impressions of a man 
of such singular fascination. The reason for 
this personal power lay deep. Back of voice 
and personal presence, one felt the existence 
of a remarkable harmony of life. MuKord 
never seemed to require any adjustment of 
himself. That profound consciousness of 
enduring relations which lies at the core of 
his writings was not a philosophic attain- 
ment with him, but an endowment of na- 
ture, and it exhibited itself in trivial cir- 
cumstances. I suspect that deafness was 
something of a reinforcement to a tempera- 
ment like his. He heard everything that he 
needed to hear, but was conveniently rid of a 
multitude of distracting or discordant sounds; 
and so he kept on his way, a curious specta- 
tor of life, wonderfully interested in all the 
details of politics, of business, and of litera- 
ture, yet somehow making all these details 
subservient to certain great currents of 
thought upon which his mind was always 
sailing. 

This largeness of nature disclosed itself in 
his habitual treatment of philosophical or 



4 MEN AND LETTERS 

political questions. A man of science would 
say that lie had a scientific mind, which was 
capable of considering a subject, no matter 
what might be its personal bearings, in an 
abstracted, impersonal light ; and I have 
heard such a man express his surprise that 
one with a theological training could so ap- 
proach subjects which involved theological 
positions. It was this freedom from polemic 
considerations which made his discourse on 
all themes agreeable. He did not like a dis- 
pute ; he had no disposition to drag his wits 
into any boxing - match with other people's 
wits ; and thus he was often silent and appar- 
ently in polite conformity with his neighbor, 
when his real thought was quite remote. In- 
deed, he carried this so far that he sometimes 
felt his way with his friends, and waited to 
be assured of their general agreement before 
he would give them his thought. 

He was not a reformer and he was not a 
partisan. There was a singular fault of tim- 
idity in his nature, due in part to the isola- 
tion in which he dwelt ; but it was only a 
fault, for he was fearless in his thought, 
and when he knew with whom he was talk- 
ing and that he would not be misunderstood, 
he was unreserved in the expression of his 



ELISHA MULFORD 5 

thought. He suffered in some men's judg- 
ment for this, I think, for there are always 
those who are impatient if the men on their 
side, as they say, do not come out squarely. 
Mulford had the patience of a scholar, and 
the sense of large relations which made him 
hesitate about taking a position which would 
identify him with some particular party or 
sect. I am doing him no injustice when I 
say that he struck out in the proofs the pas- 
sage from his book. The Nation^ which car- 
ried his statement regarding the ballot to its 
logical conclusion in woman suffrage. He 
did not retract his personal opinion, and he 
left all the premises for the advocates of wo- 
man suffrage to use, but he did not mean to 
identify himself with a special propaganda. 
He knew that if he did, many persons would 
read his book as if it had only that sentence 
in it, and he refused to have his larger 
thought turned into a shibboleth. It was 
this comprehensiveness of his mind which 
dwarfed many of the petty distinctions to 
which others clung, and made him sought 
by men of the most contradictory views. 
More than this, his comprehensiveness was 
not mere tolerance, and it was impossible to 
give him a name which implied a philosophic 



6 MEN AND LETTERS 

eclecticism. Others might for convenience 
dub him a Broad Churchman in theology, 
but a High Churchman would have found 
him in many respects congenial and might 
zealously have claimed him. It is only party 
men who are uneasy unless they can label 
other persons. Mulford never labelled his 
associates, and no one who obtained a real 
insight of his nature felt any disposition to 
label him. 

Under the simple condition of general 
sympathy, his gift of thought was most gen- 
erous. He published but two books and a 
few magazine or newspaper articles, and he 
delivered but one or two courses of lectures 
in theology. Yet he gave not merely to his 
friends, he lavished upon any appreciative 
listener, with unstinting freedom, the pro- 
duct of his thought on a wide range of sub- 
jects. If any one has kept a record of Mul- 
ford's monologues, and has faithfully re- 
ported his speech, he ought to give it to the 
public. I call them monologues, for brief- 
ness' sake, but there was in Mulford's talk 
none of that vain love of intellectual display 
which is apt to affect monologue. It was 
a pleasure to him to talk, but he liked to 
take the cue from his friend. His deafness 



ELISHA MULFORD 7 

stood somewhat in the way of free conversa- 
tion, but there must have been few of his 
friends who would not rather listen than do 
more than just keep him supplied with 
topics. Indeed, he had a little trick of 
which he seemed only partially aware. If 
very much absorbed in what he was saying, 
he would idly push his ear -trumpet almost 
out of reach ; it was a signal to his neigh- 
bor not to interrupt him. Then, when he 
had had his say, he would secure the trum- 
pet again, hold it up, and intimate his readi- 
ness to hear what was to be said to that. 
Shut out largely from general intercourse 
with people, he made much of his friends in 
the way of familiar visits. At the end of an 
evening, when one was laying aside books 
and papers, a ring at the bell would announce 
a caller. Enter Mulford, very doubtful 
about putting aside his hat and coat : he had 
come in merely for a moment ; he could not 
stay. Then one put more wood on the fire, 
and settled one's self to that three or four 
hours' talk which was sure to follow, with 
good-byes at last under the stars at midnight, 
that seemed nearer than before. 

The miracle which he worked in his con- 
versation with friends was the multiplication 



8 MEN AND LETTERS 

of their thoughts. One brought to him one's 
latest idea or scheme, — it was always easy 
to do that, — and Mulf ord took it, reflected 
a moment, and gave it back enlarged, en- 
riched, set in wide relations, and illuminated 
by a sudden glory. That positiveness which 
rules in his writings was a delightful quality 
in his personal judgments. He spoke as one 
having authority, not as a special pleader ; 
for the results which he announced were 
reached not by a careful weighing of evi- 
dence, but by a clear, direct perception 
which went at once to the bottom of the mat- 
ter. There was a deliberation in his manner 
which added weight to what he said, and 
gave a convincing tone which seemed at the 
time to go further than an argument. A 
friend who was about to deliver a course of 
lectures allowed himself to speak with mis- 
givings of his undertaking. Mulf ord thought 
a moment, turned aside his head in his sage 
way, and presently declared himself some- 
what as follows : — 

" Now, there is no one within sight or 
sound of Boston who knows as much upon 
this subject as you do. Therefore you should 
give your lectures without fear or favor. 
You have no apology to make. You must 
speak with authority." 



ELISHA MULFORD 9 

He evidently thought his friend needed a 
little bracing, but his manner of reinforcing 
him was his own. For Mulford was gener- 
ous in his endowment of his friends. Many a 
person has acquired new confidence in him- 
self because Mulford believed in him so 
thoroughly. His imagination was busy over 
those whom he loved. He sometimes made 
them over, clothing them with all the attri- 
butes they ought to have, but in such cases 
he wrought upon qualities which he recog- 
nized ; seizing upon some lurking excellence, 
he amplified it until it seemed the one char- 
acteristic of the man. It was this large 
charity of judgment which made his esti- 
mates of men always worth listening to. 

Indeed, there was something humorously 
enjoyable in his way of regarding persons 
and places that had won his affection. He 
was most loyal to his own. He thought 
Pennsylvania unquestionably the foremost 
State in the Union, Susquehanna County the 
fairest of its divisions, and the district which 
took in Montrose and Friend sville the heart 
of the county. Then his friends in their 
several professions were incontestably in the 
front ranks, and their opinions on various 
subjects were well worth attention. He did 



10 MEN AND LETTERS 

not make swans of geese, by any means, but 
bis swans were all of the best strain. There 
was a glamour, which never suggested the 
slightest insincerity, in all his regard for the 
men who attracted him. He was sturdily 
theirs, and it did one good to find so honest 
a lover of men. 

It is also true that his friends showed 
themselves at their best to him. Possibly, 
again, his deafness helped them. It was 
such an effort to speak to him at any length 
that it was hardly worth while to give him 
anything but one's best thought. But this 
was not all. He was so eager to hear and 
was beforehand so sure one had something 
worth telling, that he quickened the wits of 
his friends. Besides, like begets like, and 
Mulford, with his generous way of looking 
at things, made one wish to think like him ; 
not necessarily with the same conclusions, 
but with the same breadth and comprehen- 
siveness. Those who were most with him 
fell into his little mannerisms ; they caught 
themselves using his favorite expressions ; 
they had an odd sensation of echoing his style 
of thought. His correspondents were apt to 
feel his presence when they wrote to him, 
and to give a turn to their sentences which 
made them sound like Mulford's own. 



EL I SEA MULFORD H 

He had a half -humorous fondness for his 
own phrases. Those sounding forms which 
make The Nation a puzzle to some readers, 
a revelation to others, were very apt to recur 
in his conversation, and to afford stepping- 
stones when one was crossing some stream 
of his thought. I remember how greatly he 
was pleased as well as amused by a tribute 
once paid to him by a Union soldier, who 
had fought bravely through the war, and 
when it was all over, and he had settled 
down into civil life, read The Nation. '* I 
did not know before why I fought ! " ex- 
claimed the enthusiastic reader. " I know 
now. It was because the Nation was a 
Moral Organism ! " 

No one could have believed more devoutly 
in the thought which underlies this book 
than Mulford himself. It was no pretty 
piece of rhetoric to him, no well-fitting the- 
ory of political life. Nothing would have 
disturbed him more than to hear his belief 
called a theory. He wrought at the concep- 
tion of his work in profound silence. He 
was living on the broad acres of a Pennsyl- 
vania farm, remote from men, from steam, 
from the confusion of cities. He walked 
afield with his thoughts for companions, and 



12 MEN AND LETTERS 

came back to his fireside to write in labored, 
compact sentences tlie result of his ponder- 
ing. For months he shunned all but the 
nearest companionship, wrote no letters, but 
read, and kindled as he read, in the news- 
papers of the day; for he interpreted the 
common news by the thought of national 
life over which he was brooding. In May, 

1867, he wrote, with a sigh of relief from 
the long tension : " I have had this incessant 
and imperative work, of which I have just 
turned the last page, and it has precluded all 
other work or thought, and scarcely allowed 
rest." 

To turn the last page is with most men 
to be through with the work, except for 
some slight revision, but with Mulford it 
meant only that the book had its thought 
consecutively presented. He could now look 
at it as a piece of literature, and see what 
was to be done. A year later, in May, 

1868, he wrote : " I can send the whole 
manuscript to you before the close of the 
month, excepting the close of the last chap- 
ter, which I would like to keep for a few 
days longer." He had spent the year in 
putting his book in order. Six weeks later 
he wrote : "I cannot justify, and only re- 



ELISHA MULFORD 13 

gret, the entire neglect in not answering 
your note earlier. If I could look upon 
myself apart from self, I might find some 
cause for it in the indifference which follows 
the close of so long a period as these three 
years of almost incessant work, but I do not 
like this study of these ' phenomenal phases * 
of action. The fact is that I have been 
adrift and at sea with two or three of my 
critics. One whose judgment I hold most 
highly has insisted that the style and man- 
ner of my book is not equal to its substance 
and thought. The estimate which they have 
given of the latter is so high that I will not 
repeat it, at least in this writing, and they 
claim for the book an influence and a place 
which is very far beyond any immediate 
result that I should have anticipated, if I 
had allowed myself to think upon it. At 
last, if I can do so, with no infraction of 
my arrangements with you,^ I have deter- 
mined to re-write the whole book, as faith- 
fully and carefully as I can, and then I shall 
have the satisfaction, in any result, of having 
given to it my utmost endeavor. The re- 
vision will affect only the style, the illus- 

1 I had been acting as his intermediary with the pub- 
lishing house which finally issued the book. 



14 MEN AND LETTERS 

tration and presentation of tlie tliouglit of 
the book, and it will not materially change 
the size or scope of it. I shall care rather 
to avoid anything like the fatigue and toil 
of conception which I knew was apparent 
in my manuscript. ... I know the work I 
have imposed upon myself, and I have no 
doubt still how much my book may gain 
from it, but I have been afraid that this 
conclusion might impair my engagements 
with you. With this re-writing, I could 
scarcely finish my work before the close of 
October or the early part of November, but 
then, and at no later day, I could place my 
manuscript finally in your hands." 

November came and went, and December, 
with promises of the book in a few weeks, 
in a few daj^s, and then early in January, 
1869, came a letter beginning, " I write so 
reluctantly in my conclusion that it may be 
allowed me to write abruptly. The con- 
clusion is that I am reluctant to let my 
manuscript pass under your eye until I 
have toiled yet longer on it ; that I think 
the work of the remaining months of the 
winter will be all it will require, and then I 
shall have at least the satisfaction of having 
been faithful to it. The thought has not 



ELISHA MULFORD 15 

changed, and since last spring the book has 
not added a cubit to its stature, and yet I 
know how necessary the toil which art has 

demanded. . . . Then my friend Mr. , 

of whose critical judgment I have the highest 
regard, has offered and insisted that at the 
outset I should read it to him. That re- 
quires my going to Chicago, but I have 
determined to go." 

It was not till the fall of 1869 that Mul- 
ford came on with his book, to be near the 
press when it was being set up. The manu- 
script was all ready, but he wished to ask 
two or three friends to go over the proofs 
with him. Those who shared in this work 
will remember the looks of the proof-sheets 
after they finally left the author's hands ; 
scarcely a sentence was left unamended, and 
it was almost a surprise to see the volume 
finally in April, looking as innocent of error 
as most printed books. Seven times, Mul- 
ford told me, had he written the book over, 
and he certainly wrote it once more when he 
corrected his proofs. It was an expression 
of his faith in the doctrine of his book that 
when it was off his hands he grudged the 
delay in putting it upon the market, since 
he was impressed with the conviction that 



16 MEN AND LETTERS 

it was needed for the fall elections ! That 
was Mulford's way of expressing also his 
belief in the high range of common political 
thinking. I never heard of The Nation as 
a campaign document, but I have read many 
books and political papers and speeches since 
that day in which I could read The Nation 
writ over again, small and large. 

I have given this little history of a re- 
markable book because it illustrates some- 
what the intellectual habit of the author. 
He brooded long over his thought in funda- 
mental matters, and was extremely critical 
of the final form. It was ten years before 
he appeared with his second book, The Re- 
public of God^ but the underlying thought 
of both books had been familiar to him in 
its main outline long before. They were 
two parts of an undivided conception of 
human society in its divine relations, and 
his mind dwelt for years in a region of 
thought so comprehensive that his real diffi- 
culty was in limiting and formulating his 
expression. He had done this twice, the 
second time with much more ease than the 
first ; and I am confident that, had he lived, 
he would have produced books with increas- 
ing rapidity, and that he would have taken 



ELISHA MULFORD 17 

a wide range in the discussion of sociolog- 
ical, literary, scientific, and psychological 
questions. These books would all have 
borne the same stamp ; they would have 
been applications to current themes of the 
philosophical faith which he held. Some 
one once said, " What a narrow man Mul- 
ford is ! — but then he is narrow on great 
lines." I can understand how the speaker 
could have said this : he had heard Mulford 
talk a few times, and had noted the recur- 
rence to his favorite generalizations. But 
it would be by an extraordinary stretch of 
meaning that one would ever think of using 
the word " narrow " in connection with Mul- 
ford. He was narrow as a canon is narrow, 
when the depth apparently contracts the 
sides. 

What I have said may in part explain the 
conviction which those had who were nearest 
to him, that the man always impressed them 
as greater than his books. His books suf- 
fered from the restraint of his thought, and 
because their very completeness and finality 
of statement conspired to shut up the thought 
in them within certain definite limits. But 
in the freedom of conversation these limits 
were not suggested. When he first began 



18 MEN AND LETTERS 

to lecture before his students in theology he 
was embarrassed by his notes. He had 
written out what he had to say, and he 
read the draft with painful care, but when 
he was through with it the hour was not 
gone. The young men still sat attentive, 
but his formal lecture was over. He was 
uneasy a moment, then he repeated a phrase ; 
it opened the gates, the stream of talk began 
to flow, his embarrassment was at an end, 
and the students were delighted with the 
freshness, the life, the stimulating fullness, 
of his thought. It was so always. Let 
him get rid of the restrictions of a hard 
and fast systematic presentation, and he was 
himself again. The singular part of it was 
that his extemporaneous speech, his unpre- 
meditated discourse, was uncommonly fine in 
form. It was not that he was now vague 
where before he had been precise ; he was 
free where before he had been fettered. He 
once asked me about a certain person, and 
I said that I did not find conversation with 
him a great pleasure ; that while he regarded 
conversation as a fine art, he was too much 
occupied with the best form of his sentences 
when he was talking. " Yes," said Mul- 
ford, " it is not hay that we want in conver- 



EL18HA MULFORD 19 

sation, but growing* grass." That was the 
charm of his speech. It sprang freely from 
his mind, and one seemed to see thought 
growing as the grass grows. 

There was one characteristic of his con- 
versation which he shared with other good 
talkers, but had in a high degree of develop- 
ment. He could recall conversations he 
had had with interesting persons, and could 
repeat them with great vivacity. He remem- 
bered minute details in personal history, and 
had that liking for gossip, where it dealt 
with characteristic expressions of men and 
women worth knowing, which is so humane 
and so free from pettiness. Yet he had an 
impatience of books of gossip. Such a book, 
for example, as the Journals of J, C Young 
had no charm for him, but he would read 
with avidity a memoir which laid bare the 
thought of a strong man. He used to speak 
of Mark Pattison's Isaac Casauhon as a 
model of what a biography should be. 

He was a wide reader, but I sometimes 
think he read most diligently at the two ends 
of literature, for he was a devourer of news- 
papers and a constant reader of Shakespeare. 
His friends, who knew his tastes, kept him 
supplied with a great variety of pubKc prints, 



20 MEN AND LETTERS 

and he had an instinct for the editorial 
article which speaks something more than 
the casual opinion of some hasty writer. He 
thought the newspapers went deeper than the 
pulpit in their tone during the summer of 
Garfield's sickness, and he listened eagerly 
to the roar of the great city which he heard 
as he scanned the columns of the city papers. 
And Shakespeare ! He never tired of study- 
ing human thought as it was presented in 
the men and women of Shakespeare's drama. 
His fine literary sense and his insight of 
character found here their fullest intellectual 
enjoyment. He liked to read his Shake- 
speare in an edition which was a fac-simile of 
the first folio ; his imagination thus brought 
him more directly into Shakespeare's pres- 
ence. That world of life shut up within 
the covers of a book was a city which he vis- 
ited often ; he knew it by heart in the best 
sense, and no actor could present Shake- 
speare but Mulford brought to bear a criti- 
cism which was far beyond any mere judg- 
ment of fidelity to text, or even to accepted 
versions of character. It was a penetrating 
and illuminating judgment of the Shake- 
spearean person who was under representa- 
tion. The reader of The Nation will have 



ELISHA MULFORD 21 

been struck by tbe frequent felicitous cita- 
tions from Shakespeare. Mulford's regard 
for Shakespeare as a political thinker was 
very great, and he was constantly bearing 
testimony to this effect. He regarded him 
also as a great humanizer, and used to ex- 
press the wish that the missionaries might 
translate Shakespeare into the Chinese 
tongue ; he thought the people of China 
needed nothing so much. 

There are some men whose speculations 
are of such a nature that one feels a wistful 
desire to know what new disclosures of truth 
await them after their sudden transfer from 
this scene of mental activity. One can 
hardly have that feeling with regard to Mul- 
ford. The field of his thought was in this 
world. He held that large conception of 
eternity which was so vital a part of Mau- 
rice's teaching, — a conception which disre- 
garded almost willfully any aid from the fu- 
ture ; his thought of prophecy left the pre- 
dictive element quite out of view. He did 
not reason concerning this world and the 
next, but rather of this world as seen in its 
universal relations, and the central truth of 
his theology gave a sublimity to human na- 
ture which cast its glow over everything 



22 MEN AND LETTERS 

which man cares for. It is hard, as the say- 
ing is, to make him dead. He does not be- 
long among the dead. His luminous nature 
lives on, but it is the sorrowful fortune of 
his friends that they live in the penumbra of 
his memory, not in the glow of his presence. 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS AET. 

When the history of civilization in Amer- 
ica comes to be written, the judicious author 
will begin a consideration of the period which 
we are just now unwittingly closing, some- 
what as follows : — 

There was as yet no sign of any general 
interest in the graphic arts. Here and there 
a painter of portraits found a scanty recog- 
nition among families moved more by pride 
of station than by love of art, and a lonely 
painter of landscapes had tried to awaken 
enthusiasm for autumn scenes, which were 
taken to be the contribution of America to 
subjects in landscape art ; but such men es- 
caped to Europe, if fortunate, and found a 
more congenial home there. Popular appre- 
hension of art was wanting ; there was no 
public to which the painter could appeal with 
any confidence, nor indeed any public out 
of which a painter would naturally emerge. 
Then it was that a group of poets began to 
sing, having little persoiial connection with 



24 MEN AND LETTERS 

each other, forming no school, very diverse 
in aim, but all obedient to the laws of art. 
The effect upon the people was not confined 
to a development of the love of poetry ; it 
was impossible that the form which art first 
took in America should be exclusive of other 
forms : on the contrary, poetry, the pioneer, 
led after it in rapid succession the graphic 
and constructive arts and music. Now we 
may trace this influence of poetry most dis- 
tinctly in the case of Longfellow's work. 
Not only was his poetry itself instinct with 
artistic power, but his appropriating genius 
drew within the circle of his art a great va- 
riety of illustration and suggestion from the 
other arts. The subjects which he chose for 
his verse often compelled the interpretation 
of older examples of art. He had a catho- 
lic taste, and his rich decoration of simple 
themes was the most persuasive agency at 
work in familiarizing Americans with the 
treasures of art and legend in the Old World. 
Even when dealing expressly with American 
subjects, his mind was so stored with the 
abundance of a maturer civilization that he 
was constantly, by reference and allusion, 
carrying the reader on a voyage to Europe. 
Before museums were established in the cit- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 25 

ies, and before his countrymen had begun to 
go in shoals to the Old World, Longfellow 
had, in his verse, made them sharers in the 
riches of art. It is not too much to say that 
he was the most potent individual force for 
culture in America, and the rapid spread of 
taste and enthusiasm for art, which may be 
noted in the people near the end of his long 
and honorable career, may be referred more 
distinctly to his influence than to that of any 
other American. 

So far our judicious historian, who has, as 
men of his class are apt to have, a weakness 
for periods and sounding phrases. Still a 
quotation from his forthcoming treatise does 
not seem wholly out of place as an introduc- 
tion to an examination of those principles of 
art which controlled Longfellow, in his con- 
scious and unconscious development of power. 
In studying his genius we have the double 
advantage of a chronological series of poems, 
and a tolerably continuous expression, by the 
poet, of his attitude toward his work, in the 
form of diaries and letters. His was one of 
those rare natures that perceive their destiny 
with distinctness from the time when con- 
sciousness makes them distinct persons. He 
knew as well in the last year of his college 



26 MEN AND LETTERS 

life that lie was meant for literature as lie 
did in the last year of his earthly life. He 
saw with clearness of poetic vision the mean- 
ing of his endowment, and with that fine 
confidence in his destiny which is faith in 
the unseen he steered for port. Yet it is 
important to note that not poetry but litera- 
ture was to him first his vocation ; that the 
differentiation by which he finally devoted 
himself exclusively to poetic art took place 
slowly. We get a glimpse of the early de- 
termining spirit when we read the letter 
which he wrote to his father from Brunswick, 
in his eighteenth year. 

" The fact is," he writes, after detailing 
his immediate plans, — " and I will not dis- 
guise it in the least, for I think I ought not, 
— the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after 
future eminence in literature ; my whole 
soul burns ardently for it, and every earthly 
thought centres in it. There may be some- 
thing visionary in this, but I flatter myself 
that I have prudence enough to keep my 
enthusiasm from defeating its own object by 
too great haste. Surely, there never was a 
better opportunity offered for exertion of lit- 
erary talent in our own country than is now 
offered. To be sure, most of our literary 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 27 

men thus far have not been professedly so, 
until they have studied and entered the 
practice of theology, law, or medicine. But 
this is evidently lost time. I do believe that 
we ought to pay more attention to the opin- 
ion of philosophers, that ' nothing but nature 
can qualify a man for knowledge.' Whether 
nature has given me any capacity for know- 
ledge or not, she has, at any rate, given me 
a very strong predilection for literary pur- 
suits ; and I am almost confident in believ- 
ing that, if I can ever rise in the world, it 
must be by the exercise of my talent in the 
wide field of literature. With such a belief, 
I must say that I am unwilling to engage in 
the study of the law. . . . Let me reside one 
year at Cambridge; let me study belles-let- 
tres, and after that time it will not require 
a spirit of prophecy to predict with some de- 
gree of certainty what kind of a figure I 
could make in the literary world." 

This was the eager outlook of a young 
man who uses some of the conventional 
phrases of youth, and puts forward the plea 
which a son thinks will be operative with a 
father ; but there is an unmistakably genuine 
ring to the expression of faith in his calling, 
and the resolution which he showed in the 



28 MEN AND LETTERS 

next few years, when lie was qualifying him- 
self ostensibly for the post of professor, but 
quite consciously for the larger field of liter- 
ature, disclosed a strong nature not afflicted 
by petty doubts. The testimony of a friend 
affords a further glimpse of the young poet 
when he was comprehending more fully the 
power which he held. Mr. George W. Greene, 
in dedicating his The Life of Nathanael 
Greene to Longfellow, recalls an evening in 
Naples when the two friends were drawn 
into mutual confidences. 

" We wanted," he says, " to be alone, and 
yet to feel that there was life all around us. 
We went up to the flat roof of the house, 
where, as we walked, we could look down 
into the crowded street, and out upon the 
wonderful bay, and across the bay to Ischia 
and Capri and Sorrento, and over the house- 
tops and villas and vineyards to Vesuvius. 
The ominous pillar of smoke hung suspended 
above the fatal mountain, reminding us of 
Pliny, its first and noblest victim. A golden 
vapor crowned the bold promontory of Sor- 
rento, and we thought of Tasso. Capri was 
calmly sleeping, like a sea-bird upon the 
waters ; and we seemed to hear the voice of 
Tacitus from across the gulf of eighteen cen- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 29 

turies, telling us that the historian's pen is 
still powerful to absolve or to condemn long 
after the imperial sceptre has fallen from the 
withered hand. There, too, lay the native 
island of him whose daring mind conceived 
the fearful vengeance of the Sicilian Ves- 
pers. We did not yet know Niccolini ; but 
his grand verses had already begun their 
work of regeneration in the Italian heart. 
Virgil's tomb was not far off. The spot con- 
secrated by Sannazaro's ashes was near us. 
And over all, with a thrill like that of sol- 
emn music, fell the splendor of the Italian 
sunset. 

" We talked and mused by turns, till the 
twilight deepened and the stars came forth to 
mingle their mysterious influences with the 
overmastering magic of the scene. It was 
then that you unfolded to me your plans of 
life, and showed me from what ^deep cis- 
terns ' you had already learned to draw. 
From that day the office of literature took a 
new place in my thoughts. I felt its form- 
ing power as I had never felt it before, and 
began to look with a calm resignation upon 
its trials, and with true appreciation upon 
its rewards. Thenceforth, little as I have 
done of what I wished to do, literature has 



30 MEN AND LETTERS 

been the inspiration, the guide, and the com- 
fort of my life." 

This was in 1828, and not long after 
Longfellow was writing home : " My poetic 
career is finished. Since I left America I 
have hardly put two lines together." It could 
not, therefore, have been the prophecy of a 
distinctly poetic vocation which so deeply 
moved Greene ; it must rather have been 
that Longfellow, after two years' travel and 
study in Europe, and when looking forward 
to definite academic work in America, was 
forecasting a life devoted to literary art, in 
which poetry was not the predominant ele- 
ment. When a collegian he had won his 
little reputation almost exclusively as a poet. 
To his friends, watching him across the 
water, that was his character, and it was no 
doubt in answer to natural inquiries that he 
declared his poetic career finished. That he 
was sincere in this belief is clearly seen by 
the entry in his note-book, at this time, of 
the subjects upon which he proposed at once 
to write. They were all of them planned for 
prose treatment, and, what is even more no- 
ticeable, they were drawn from American 
life and history. 

It is customary to speak of Longfellow as 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 31 

if his Americanism was an accident, his nat- 
ural disposition leading him really to an 
emigration in thought and sentiment to the 
other side of the Atlantic. In point of fact, 
he passed through the experience of many- 
ingenuous American youth. He ardently 
desired an introduction to the Old World ; 
he entered quickly and warmly into the 
spirit of the past, but instead of losing him- 
self in this spirit, he found himself ; he took 
his spiritual bearings, and as a result set his 
face more positively westward than could 
have been possible had he never gone 
through the process of orientation. It is a 
superficial judgment which determines the 
nationality of a literary artist by his choice 
of subjects alone. Longfellow in Europe, 
jotting down in his diary subjects drawn 
from life in the Maine woods, was no more 
essentially American than he was essentially 
European when he was sitting in his study 
in Brunswick and writing Outre-Jfer. The 
residence in Europe made him eager for 
his American life; the return to America 
brought back with a rush the recollection of 
European scenes. In both cases the artist 
was employing the convenient perspective of 
time and space. What was remote shaped 



32 MEN AND LETTERS 

itself more definitely into picturesque rela- 
tions to his mind; only to the student just 
returned from Europe, after three years of 
incessant occupation with new and sugges- 
tive forms of life and art, his own personal 
experience offers so rich and tumultuous a 
collection of themes that all else is for the 
time held in abeyance. 

This was markedly true in Longfellow's 
case, because his mind by natural disposition 
busied itself with the secondary rather than 
with the primary facts of nature and society. 
He was born and trained until he was nine- 
teen in a society and amidst scenes exceed- 
ingly simple, almost elemental, indeed. No 
one can read the chapters in his Life which 
deal with his home in Portland and his edu- 
cation at Bowdoin College, — especially no 
one can have recollection of the primitive, 
provincial period of New England which had 
its culmination just before the first steamer 
crossed the Atlantic, — without perceiving 
how much had been eliminated from the 
American variation of the English mind by 
the absence for two centuries of familiar con- 
tact with university, cathedral, castle, theatre, 
gallery, and barracks. The brick college, the 
wooden meeting-house, the merchant's square- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 83 

built house, the singing-school, the peripa- 
tetic Greek Slave, the muster, — all these 
marked the limits of expression, and by con- 
sequence the strength of reacting influence. 
The effect upon individual minds differed ac- 
cording to the original constitution of those 
minds. Hawthorne, gathering blueberries 
under the pines of Brunswick with his friend 
Bridge, was subjected to very much the 
same influences as Longfellow. He went 
out into the world later, it is true, than his 
great contemporary, but the author of The 
Scarlet Letter did not need to draw his 
breath of inspiration from any mediaeval 
chronicle or under the shadow of Strasburg 
Cathedral; an old newspaper in the Salem 
Custom-House was enough for him. Long- 
fellow, on the other hand, was writing of 
Italian scenery and Venetian gondoliers 
when his visits to Italy and Venice had been 
only in boats with sails rigged from the 
leaves of books. Even when treating of dis- 
tinctly American subjects, as in the poem of 
The Indian Hunter^ he borrowed his expres- 
sion from traditions of English poetry : — 

" The foot of the reaper moved slow on the lawn, 
And the sickle cut down the yellow corn ; 
The mower sung loud by the meadow-side, 



34 MEN AND LETTERS 

Where the mists of evening were spreading wide ; 
And the voice of the herdsmen came up by the lea, 
And the dance went round by the greenwood tree." 

"Was all that the result of observations on a 
Maine farm ? No ; it indicates a mind sen- 
sitive to poetic influences as derived not so 
much from direct contact with nature as 
from indirect acquaintance through books. 
It is doubtful if there is a single line in the 
poems written before his journey to Europe 
which describes an aspect of nature specif- 
ically noted by the poet, unless it be two or 
three lines in his poem Autumn^ where he 
says : — 

" The pr.rple finch, 
That on wild cherry and red cedar feeds, 
A winter bird, comes with its plaintive whistle, 
And peeks by the witch-hazel ; " 

while there are repeated instances of entirely 
second-hand reflections of scenes which were 
impossible to his eye, as when, in his poem 
To lanthe^ he says : — 



and, 



* ' As I mark the moss-grown spring 
By the twisted holly," 

" Twisted close the ivy clings 
To the oak that 's hoarest." 



Even wben dealing with a slight historic 
fact, as in the Hymn of the Moravian Nuns 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 35 

of Bethlehem^ he translates the entire inci- 
dent into terms o£ foreign import. The dy- 
ing flame of day shoots its ray through the 
chancel ; the glimmering tapers shed faint 
light on the cowled head ; the burning cen- 
ser swings before the altar ; the nuns' sweet 
hymn is sung low in the dim, mysterious 
aisle. Yet the poem, masquerading in for- 
eign dress, has a native fire and an enthu- 
siasm kindled by the thought of personal 
sacrifice in a great cause. So, too, in the 
Burial of the Minnisinh^ where the red 
chief is only a mere transliteration of medi- 
aeval knight, the poetic passion flames forth 
in a single bold phrase at the end of the 
poem : — 

*' They buried the dark chief ; they freed 
Beside the grave his battle steed ; 
And swift an arrow cleaved its way 
To his stern heart ! One piercing neigh 
Arose, and, on the dead man's plain, 
The rider grasps his steed again.' ' 

It may be said, therefore, with some con- 
fidence that Longfellow's mental growth was 
accelerated, not changed, by his study in 
Europe ; that the bent of his genius was to- 
ward the artistic use of the reflected forms 
of nature and of the product of human forces ; 



36 MEN AND LETTERS 

that he sought instinctively for those expres- 
sions of life which had color and richness, 
not for those which had elemental signifi- 
cance ; and that, failing to note such expres- 
sions in the life about him, he endowed the 
scenes which he depicted with qualities bor- 
rowed from an older, more complex civili- 
zation. The very sober needlewomen of 
the Moravian sisterhood were seen through 
painted glass ; the squaws who sold baskets 
in Portland became a dark -haired virgin 
train, chanting the death dirge of the slain ; 
and it is only an anthropologist, accustomed 
to the meagre results of an exploration among 
mounds, who will at first glance detect the 
plain truth concerning the savage, when he 
reads : — 

" A dark cloak of tke roebuck's skin 
Covered the warrior, and -within 
Its heary folds the weapons, made 
For the hard toils of war, were laid ; 
The cuirass, woven of plaited reeds, 
And the broad belt of shells and beads." 

A Norse viking stood in the light of an Old- 
town Indian, when the poet was sketching. 

It was to a mind thus sensitive to rich 
color and complex form, and restrained from 
large opportunities during its adolescence, 
that a three years' wandering through Europe 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 37 

brouglit a fullness of experience which en- 
larged and strengthened it, and not merely 
supplied it with new objects of exercise. 
Why was it that, after writing verse with 
pleasure for two or three years, Longfellow 
should suddenly drop the occupation, declare 
his poetic career finished, and devote himself 
assiduously to prose ? And why, to antici- 
pate a further development, did he then re- 
turn to prose deliberately but once more 
after another decade ? From 1824 to 1826 
he was writing those poems which are classed 
as juvenile or earlier poems. From 1831 to 
1838 he wrote the bulk of his miscellaneous 
prose and Outre- Mgt and Hyjjerion. In 
1838 he resumed his poetic career with 
Flowers and A Psalm of Life^ and in 1848 
he wrote KavanagJi, 

I have half answered the first question al- 
ready. When he went to Europe in 1826, 
it was ostensibly to qualify himself for the 
post of professor of modern languages in 
Bowdoin College. Immediately, to use the 
energetic phrase, his eyes were opened, and 
in seeing the rich deposit of an old civiliza- 
tion, where history had for centuries been 
building a house for the imagination, he was 
conscious of power, he found himself. Yet 



38 MEN AND LETTERS 

he needed time for the thorough orientation 
which his nature demanded. There are 
some poets who become naturalized in anti- 
quity as soon as they land after their first 
voyage. Keats was one of these. There 
are others who, if they take out their papers 
early, do not at once exercise the rights of 
citizenship, and Longfellow was one of these. 
The period between his first emigration to 
Europe, in 1826, and his final settlement at 
Cambridge, in 1836, was one of accumula- 
tion and disposition of his treasures. The 
circumstances of his outer life, his succes- 
sive journeys for specific purpose, his brief 
trial of teaching at Bowdoin, his experiments 
in literature, corresponded with the internal 
adjustment of his mind to its vocation. It 
was his apprentice time, and only when Hy- 
perion was executed did he feel within him- 
self that he had become a master. 

His prose during this decade indicates 
very clearly his spiritual and artistic growth. 
He had come, by travel and study, into pos- 
session of a great store of material, the value 
of which he was ready to discern. He was 
laying then the foundation of that familiar 
acquaintance with the localities of legend and 
song and literary art, which gave to all his 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 39 

work, so far as it was allusive of art, a light- 
ness of touch, a confidence and an affection- 
ateness of handling. It took him ten years, 
however, to make all this material really his 
own ; he began the process by simple de- 
scription, and prose was his natural vehicle. 
His letters show how quickly he caught the 
spirit of what he saw, and a comparison 
of Outre-Mer with them indicates the pres- 
ence in his mind of a distinct literary sense. 
One may prefer the directness of the letters, 
but cannot help seeing that when Longfellow 
set up the same material in his book he was 
studying the form of presentation, and rec- 
ognized that literature was something other 
than letter-writing. Along with and follow- 
ing Outre-Mer were those special studies of 
modern language and literature which con- 
fessed the student rather than the traveller ; 
and then came Hyperion^ in which the imag- 
inative constructive power began to reassert 
itself, and all the aspects of life and litera- 
ture which had met the eye of the traveller 
and student were considered by the poetic 
mind and the creative genius. As has been 
so often pointed out, the tale is a rescript, 
only slightly disguised, of the poet's spiritual 
as well as external experience ; but only 



40 MEN AND LETTERS 

when one considers it as the final outcome of 
a period of mental reconstruction does one 
apprehend the entire significance of the work. 
It marks the completion of Longfellow's ap- 
prenticeship to literature, and, like most 
such critical works, it is as prophetic as it 
is historical. 

When, shortly after the publication of 
Hyperion^ Longfellow suddenly resolved to 
publish a volume of poems, it may be fairly 
assumed that he was in no sense renouncing 
prose, but only thinking of himself as an 
active litterateur^ who was not shut up to 
any one form of expression. He was not 
yet, indeed, so conscious of his destiny that 
he could not outline, a few days later, a plan 
of literary work which embraced a history of 
English poetry, a novel, a series of sketches, 
and only one poem. His resolution to issue 
Voices of the NigJit undoubtedly sprang 
from the growing recognition of his poetic 
faculty. He was still a student, but the ur- 
gency of the student - mood was passed ; the 
riches of human thought had become in a 
measure his possession; his personal expe- 
rience had been enlarged and deepened ; he 
no longer saw principally the outside of the 
world ; youth with its surrender to the mo- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 41 

ment had gone, and manhood with its hours 
of reflection had come. So we may interpret 
the poet's mood as it discloses itself in the 
verses which introduce his first volume of 
original poetry. 

But this little book offers a significant clue 
to the interpretation of the poet's art. In 
L^ Envois which closes the book and serves 
as a poetic summary of its contents, he 
speaks of — 

" Tongues of the dead, not lost, 
But speaking frora Death's frost, 
Like fiery tongues at Pentecost ! ' ' 

In truth, one of the most interesting phases 
of the apprenticeship to literature which 
Longfellow passed through was the manner 
in which he kept alive that spark of poetic 
fire which, feeble enough in his adolescence, 
was yet genuine. In the same letter in 
which he wrote to his sister, " My poetic 
career is finished," he attempted a transla- 
tion of a lovely little Portuguese song, and 
as soon as he began his series of prose writ- 
ings he began also that series of translations 
which would alone have given him the name 
of poet. It was necessary, in the course of 
his critical work, to give examples of verse, 
and he was thus constantly impelled to use 



42 MEN AND LETTERS 

the metrical form ; then when he essayed 
the romance form, and cast his scenes large- 
ly in Germany, the very structure of his 
work called for those "flowers of song" 
which were the essential expression of the 
life which he was translating into artistic 
mode. 

Throughout his life Longfellow found in 
the work of translation a gentle stimulus to 
his poetic faculty, and resorted to it when he 
wished to quicken his spirit. " I agree with 
you entirely," he writes to Freiligrath, No- 
vember 24, 1843, " in what you say about 
translations. It is like running a plough- 
share through the soil of one's mind ; a thou- 
sand germs of thought start up (excuse this 
agricultural figure), which otherwise might 
have lain and rotted in the ground. Still, 
it sometimes seems to me like an excuse for 
being lazy, — ^like leaning on another man's 
shoulder." This is, however, but a partial 
explanation of the place which translation 
held in Longfellow's art. One must go back 
to the very nature of this poet to see why it 
is that so large a proportion of his poetical 
work was either direct translation or a re- 
construction from foreign material. In the 
complete edition of his writings, three of the 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 43 

nine volumes of poetry are given to tlie trans- 
lation of Dante, with, to be sure, tlie volu- 
minous apparatus of notes and illustrations, 
while of another volume about two thirds of 
the matter consist of translations from vari- 
ous languages. But the longest section of 
Tales of a Wayside Inn^ the Musician's 
Tale of the Saga of King Olaf is scarcely 
other than a paraphrase ; The Mother s 
Ghosts in the same book, is openly from the 
Danish ; and Christus^ Judas Maccahmus^ 
and Michael Angelo are largely indebted 
to other forms of literature for their very 
phrases. It would not be difficult for one, 
running through the entire body of poems, 
to find in those relating to foreign subjects 
a constant indirect reference to existing lit- 
erary material. Not only so, but in such 
poems as The Courtship of Miles Standish 
and Evangeline the scaffolding which the 
poet used could easily be put up again by 
the historical student ; of the Tales of a 
Wayside Inn^ only one is in any peculiar 
sense the poet's invention ; while Hiawatha 
is Schoolcraft translated into poetry. 

It is when one enlarges the conception of 
the word " translation " that one perceives 
the value as well as the limitations of Long- 



44 MEN AND LETTERS 

fellow's art. He was a consummate trans- 
lator, because the vision and faculty divine 
wliich lie possessed was directed toward the 
reflection of the facts of nature and society, 
rather than toward the facts themselves. 
He was like one who sees a landscape in 
a Claude Lorraine glass ; by some subtle 
power of the mirror everything has been com- 
posed for him. Thus, when he came to use 
the rich material of history, of poetry, and of 
other arts, Longfellow saw these in forms 
already existing, and his art was not so much 
a reconstruction out of crude material as a 
representation, a rearrangement, in his own 
exquisite language, of what he found and ad- 
mired. He was first of all a composer, and 
he saw his subjects in their relations rather 
than in their essence. To tell over again 
old tales, to reproduce in forms of delicate 
fitness the scenes and narratives which others 
had invented, — this was his delight ; for in 
doing this he was conscious of his power and 
he worked with ease. Thus it is that the lyr- 
ical translations which he made in his stu- 
dent days are really his own poems ; he ren- 
dered the foreign form in a perfect English 
form ; his work in this regard was that of 
an engraver, not that of a photographer. 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 45 

He has himself said on the general subject 
of translation : — 

" The great art of translating well lies in 
the power of rendering literally the words of 
a foreign author, while at the same time we 
preserve the spirit of the original. But how 
far one of these requisites of a good transla- 
tion may be sacrificed to the other, how far 
a translator is at liberty to embellish the 
original before him while clothing it in a 
new language, is a question which has been 
decided differently by persons of different 
tastes. The sculptor, when he transfers to 
the inanimate marble the form and features 
of a living being, may be said not only to 
copy, but to translate. But the sculptor 
cannot represent in marble the beauty and 
expression of the human eye ; and in order 
to remedy this defect as far as possible, he is 
forced to transgress the rigid truth of na- 
ture. By sinking the eye deeper, and making 
the brow more prominent above it, he pro- 
duces a stronger light and shade, and thus 
gives to the statue more of the spirit and 
life of the original than he could have done 
by an exact copy. So, too, the translator." 

In that which was technically translation, 
then, Longfellow made the foreign poems 



46 MEN AND LETTERS 

his own without sacrificing the truth of the 
originals ; in that which was in a more gen- 
eral sense translation, the transfer, namely, 
of the spirit rather than the precise form of 
foreign art, he preserved the essential quality 
of what he took so perfectly as to lead many 
to underestimate the value of his own share 
in the result. Yet this fine sense of form, 
this intuitive perception of fitness, was an 
inestimable endowment of the artist, and is 
one of his passports to immortality. It is, 
however, most appreciable in those forms of 
art which are least dependent upon passion 
and more allied with the common experience ; 
in dramatic art it has less significance. The 
use of the hexameter in Evangeline and the 
adoption of the Kalevala measure in Hia- 
watha are illustrations of how a great artist 
will choose forms perfectly fitted to his pur- 
pose, yet exceedingly dangerous in the hands 
of less skillful workmen. The pathway of 
English poetry is strewn with bones of hex- 
ametrical beasts of burden, but Longfellow's 
Evangeline has made the journey to the pre- 
sent time with every prospect of carrying 
her rider to the gates of whatever blessed 
country of immunity from criticism awaits 
the poet. An interesting illustration of 
Longfellow's unerring sense of form is fur- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 47 

nished by a trifling experiment which he 
made when engaged upon Evangeline. He 
records in his diary the completion of the 
second canto of Part II., and adds, " I tried 
a passage of it in the common rhymed Eng- 
lish pentameter. It is the song of the mock- 
ing-bird : — 

" Upon a spray that overhung the stream, 
The mocking-bird, awaking from his dream, 
Poured such delirious music from his throat 
That all the air seemed listening to his note. 
Plaintive at first the song began, and slow ; 
It breathed of sadness, and of pain, and woe ; 
Then, gathering all his notes, abroad he flung 
The multitudinous music from his tongue, — 
As, after showers, a sudden gust again 
Upon the leaves shakes down the rattling rain." 

Taken by itself this verse falls agreeably on 
the ear, but it needs only a moment's thought 
to perceive that the story of Evangeline 
given in this measure would have been robbed 
of that lingering melancholy, that pathos of 
lengthening shadows, which resides in the 
hexameter as Longfellow has handled it. 
Something of all this may be seen even in 
the few lines of the poem which render the 
passage just given : — 

"Then from a neighboring thicket the mocking-bird, 
wildest of singers, 
Swinging aloft on a willow spray that hung o'er the 
■water, 



48 MEN AND LETTERS 

Shook from his little throat such floods of delirious 

music 
That the whole air and the woods and the waves seemed 

silent to listen. 
Plaintive at first were the tones and sad ; then soaring 

to m.adness 
Seemed they to follow or guide the revel of frenzied 

Bacchantes. 
Single notes were then heard, in sorrowful, low lanaen- 

tation ; 
Till, having gathered them all, he flung them ahroad 

in derision, 
As when, after a storm, a gust of wind through the 

tree-tops 
Shakes down the rattling rain in a crystal shower on 

the branches." 

The limitations of tlie rhymed pentameter 
are clearly seen in a comparison of the two 
forms, — its limitations, and also its brief 
gain, for as the expression of a single mo- 
ment the shorter form is more immediate in 
its operation. One catches the incident on 
the wing, instead of watching it slowly from 
inception to close, and I suspect that Long- 
fellow may have been led to make this little 
experiment from a perception, as he wrote 
the hexameters, of the slight loss thereby 
sustained ; if so, it is only another illustra- 
tion of his exquisite sense of form. 

The deliberate note which a poet strikes 
at the outset of his career may wisely be 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 49 

taken as indicative of his conscious judg- 
ment of his own vocation. Although, as 
we have seen, Longfellow grew into poetry- 
through the exercise of translation, and by 
a decade of fruitful study acquired that mas- 
tery of form which fixed his place in litera- 
ture primarily as an artist, it is equally true 
that the spirit which in youth at once chose 
poetry as expression was not changed, but 
only held in reserve through the formative 
period, and as soon as true maturity came 
broke forth once more in its native lan- 
guage. The I-^relude which opens Voices of 
the Night and L^ Envoi which closes the vol- 
ume together disclose the poet's attitude to- 
ward his verse. He had gathered his recent 
poems, and chosen from his scattered trans- 
lations and his earlier work such examples 
as came nearest to his more educated taste, 
and now proposed sending them out into the 
world. The very title of the volume hinted 
at the poet's mood. From the Orestes of 
Euripides he took his motto, and paraphrased 
it in the last stanza of the opening poem, 
Hymn to the Night : — 

" Peace ! Peace ! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer! 
Descend with broad-winged flight, 
The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair, 
The best-beloved Night ! " 



60 MEN AND LETTERS 

The title Voices of the Night was first given 
to the poem Footstejys of Angels^ and all of 
the poems in the section, that is, all the 
poems which sprang from the new birth of 
poetry in his mind, strike a single key, — 
that of consolation ; and so full is the poet 
of this sense of his poetic mission that he 
breaks forth at the close of his Prelude in 
these words, catching, characteristically, at a 
phrase of Sir Philip Sidney's : — 

' ' Look, then, into thine heart, and write ! 

Yes, into Life's deep stream ! 
All forms of sorrow and delight, 
All solemn Voices of the Night, 
That can soothe thee, or affright, 

Be these henceforth thy theme." 

There is no doubt that the poet's personal 
history in the period immediately preceding 
the appearance of A Psalm of Life and 
similar poems had much to do with this 
mood, and certainly this " theme " was by no 
means thenceforth his only one, although it 
reappeared frequently. It was natural, also, 
that his recent study of Jean Paul and 
other sentimental Germans should affect his 
choice and treatment of subjects, but there is 
a deeper, more fundamental account. Long- 
fellow's nature was one of religious bent ; his 
training had been that of the liberal school, 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 51 

and his interest in institutional, historical 
Christianity was rather aesthetic than inbred. 
He was also a man of deep reserve, and 
shrank not only from the disclosure of his 
intimate feeling, but generally from all rev- 
elation of sacred experience. He found in 
poetry a form of expression which permitted 
great freedom of speech without necessary 
reference to the personality of the author. 
Behind this almost transparent screen he 
could give full utterance to his own interior 
life, all the while appearing as the priest of 
humanity. It was not his own loss which he 
registered in Resignation^ although the oc- 
casion of the poem came from his own loss ; 
but he generalized his grief, and took refuge 
in his office as spokesman for the crowd of 
sorrowful ones. Thus his personal outlook 
supplied the fervor of A Psalm of Life^ and 
infused into those lines of commonplaces a 
poetic spirit which makes them have the 
sound of a trumpet call ; but the lines could 
not be tracked home to their author by any 
clue which his personal history might fur- 
nish. His home, his friends, the multitu- 
dinous experience in emotion of a sensitive 
nature, constantly supplied him with im- 
pulses to poetic expression, but he spoke for 



52 MEN AND LETTERS 

himself and others, very rarely for himself 
alone. 

It was for this reason, in part, that he 
seized so readily upon the symbols of reli- 
gion which he found in historic Christianity, 
and made use of them as forms in his poetic 
art. His delight in The Golden Legend 
was not only an artist's pleasure in rich color 
and form, but the pleasure of a religious na- 
ture working in material that allowed full 
scope to motives born of religious faith. 
The remark of Ruskin, often quoted, that 
" Longfellow, in his Golden Legend^ has 
entered more closely into the temper of the 
monk, for good and for evil, than ever yet 
theological writer or historian, though they 
may have given their life's labor to the 
analysis," is in support of this view. Long- 
fellow read the monk as he read all mediae- 
val Christianity, from the vantage of a man 
sympathetic with religion in whatever sin- 
cere form it took, unembarrassed by any per- 
sonal concern in the church which enshrined 
this particular faith, and keenly sensitive to 
whatever filled the imagination ; while, as a 
poet, and especially as a poet of high order 
as composer, he was able to select just those 
noble and essential features which justify 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 53 

claims to reverence and admiration, and to 
oppose as shades those features which could 
be regarded as transient and accidental. 

How important an element in Longfel- 
low's art was his religious feeling appears 
when one considers the two works which 
dominated his life. I have said that the 
deliberate note which a poet strikes at the 
beginning of his career ought to be heeded 
for the disclosure which it makes of his con- 
sciousness of vocation ; and the psalms of 
life which stirred Longfellow's spirit, as he 
once more found expression in poetry, showed 
him as a priest of humanity ; they were in- 
dicative of a nature religious, emotional, re- 
served, yet eagerly desirous of translating 
his discovery of himself into the broad, uni- 
versal terms. The time from 1837 to 1841, 
marked in his life by the entrance upon 
residence at Cambridge, with its duties in 
teaching not yet irksome, was a period of 
quick poetic exercise and the trial of a va- 
riety of forms. It saw, besides the Voices of 
the Nighty experiments in ballads, like The 
Wreck of the Hesperus and TJie Skeleton in 
Armor ; a drama. The Spanish Student ; 
his famous poem. Excelsior^ in which his 
art executed its most splendid feat in bridg- 



54 MEN AND LETTERS 

ing the gulf between the sublime and the 
ridiculous ; and it offers to the reader of his 
life a picture of spirited youth, weighted, in- 
deed, by physical infirmity, but with the foot 
in the stirrup. Yet of what was he think- 
ing ? What was he planning to do ? It was 
near the close of 1841 that he wrote in his 
diary : — 

" This evening it has come into my mind 
to undertake a long and elaborate poem by 
the holy name of Christ, the theme of which 
would be the various aspects of Christendom 
in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages ; " 
and he adds, characteristically using a quo- 
tation to express his own deepest thought, 
" And the swete smoke of the odorous in- 
cense whych came of the wholesome and fer- 
vent desyres of them that had fayth ascended 
up before God, out of the aungel's hande." 

It was not till 1873 that the work as it 
now stands was published; and for those 
two and thirty years which represent almost 
the whole of his productive period the sub- 
ject of the trilogy seems never to have been 
long absent from his mind. As I have said 
elsewhere, the theme, in its majesty, was a 
flame by night and a pillar of cloud by day, 
which led his mind in all its onward move- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 55 

ment, and lie esteemed tlie work which he 
had undertaken as the really great work of 
his life. His religious nature was profoundly 
moved by it, and the degree of doubt which 
attended every step of his progress marked 
the height of the endeavor which he put 
forth. There was nothing violent or eccen- 
tric in this sudden resolution. The entry in 
his journal, his biographer states, is the only 
one for that year, but his correspondence and 
the dates of his poems indicate clearly enough 
that the course of his mental and spiritual 
life was flowing in a direction which made 
this resolve a most natural and at the same 
time inspiring expression of his personality. 
He had been singing those psalms of life, 
triumphant, sympathetic, aspiring, which 
showed how strong a hold the ethical prin- 
ciple had of him ; he had been steeping his 
soul in Dante ; he had been moved by the 
tender ecclesiasticism of The Children of the 
Lord's Supper^ and in recording a passage 
in the life of Christ had fancied himself a 
monk of the Middle Ages ; while the whole 
tenor of his life and thought had shown how 
strong a personal apprehension he had of the 
divine in humanity. 

In all that calls for delicate taste, a fine 



56 MEN AND LETTERS 

sense of fitness, and a skiUf ul use of material 
already formed, this trilogy, like the other 
dramatic writings of Longfellow, has the 
poet's distinctive mark. In no part is this 
more clear than in The Divine Tragedy. A 
large portion of this drama is a deftly ar- 
ranged mosaic of passages from the evangel- 
ists, and the reader is at first quite as much 
struck with the rhythmical character of the 
King James version, which permits the 
words to fall so easily into the metrical 
order, as he is with the poet's skill in selec- 
tion and adjustment. Probably the indif- 
ference shown by people in general to this 
drama is due in part to the feeling that noth- 
ing very novel was offered. In fact, Long- 
fellow's reverence is sufficient to explain his 
lack of success. The desire which he had 
to accomplish the great work of Christus 
sprang not only from a poet's conception of 
the great movement involved in the subject, 
but from a deep sense of personal obliga- 
tion. He approached this dramatic repre- 
sentation of the Christ somewhat as a painter 
might propose a Crucifixion as a votive offer- 
ing, only that while the painter, in a great 
period of religious art, would be working in 
a perfectly well understood and accepted 



LONGFELLOW AND EIS ART 67 

mode, this poet was artistically alone, and 
was not merely not helped, but actually 
hindered by the prevalent religious temper. 
Thorwaldsen's Christ is an example of how 
an artist, unincumbered by too strong a per- 
sonal feeling, is able to avail himself of 
the sympathy of his fellow-believers. The 
statue, repeated large and small, has become 
the type of Lutheran Protestant Christian- 
ity ; but it has become so because its sculp- 
tor drew from Lutheranism his conception 
of the Christ, not so much as the Sufferer as 
the Friend. Longfellow, on the other hand, 
has added nothing to the New England con- 
ception of the Christ, because he neither 
met the requirements of the traditional faith 
which concentrated all the drama into one 
act, nor was able to precipitate the floating 
views of the liberal theology into so striking 
a dramatic form as to present a figure which 
would be recognized as the one that men 
were looking for. Perhaps that was too 
much to ask under any circumstances, and 
certainly, as a human hero of a drama, a 
more disappointing subject could not be 
found than the Man of Nazareth. At any 
rate, Longfellow was not the one to lay 
sacrilegious hands on the ark of his own 



68 MEN AND LETTERS 

hopes, and lie could not as an artist deny 
himself as a reverent believer. 

After all, the very presence of those qual- 
ities which we have observed in Longfellow's 
art seems to exclude the admission of that 
requisite to dramatic art, — passion. The 
graces which enrich the lyrical and narrative 
work are somewhat foreign from the drama. 
One needs to break bounds there, the bounds 
not of law, but of conventions, and the 
most orderly and reasonable succession of 
scenes can hardly put the reader into that 
state of forge tfulness of self which the drama 
should compel. There is one scene in Judas 
Maccahoeus^ where the mother of the seven 
sons listens to the voices of her children as 
they undergo torments in the dungeon of the 
citadel, which is conceived with fme force ; 
and yet, upon closer examination, one is 
obliged to concede that Longfellow was here 
displaying not so much dramatic conception 
as that admirable faculty in the adjustment 
and arrangement of forms already at hand 
to which I have several times referred. 

The question was asked incidentally, on 
a previous page, why, after once abandoning 
prose at the end of a decade of work in it, 
Longfellow should return to prose after an- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 59 

other decade given almost wholly to poetry. 
In 1838 Hyperion was written, and was fol- 
lowed at once by Voices of the Night. In 
1848 ICavanagh appeared, and was the last 
piece of prose produced by the author. It 
stands in the midst also of a poetic period : 
Evangeline had just been finished, and The 
Golden Legend was begun shortly after 
Kavanagh was published, while the volume 
The Seaside and the Fireside collected a 
number of noticeable short poems. 

It is probable that in writing Kavanagh 
Longfellow was obeying an impulse which 
often seizes artists, to lay at rest some ghost 
of a purpose that has pursued them. In his 
earliest plans for literary work, made on his 
first journey to Europe, he had outlined sev- 
eral sketches of American life. He made 
one or two essays in this direction after his 
return, but hid them away in annuals so care- 
fully that only recently have they been un- 
earthed. He was also somewhat in love with 
the character of a country schoolmaster, since 
it seemed to furnish the opportunity for com- 
bining the two elements of a recluse and a 
man of learning and taste. Then he could 
not help having his opinions about the na- 
tional literature which was exercising the 



60 MEN AND LETTERS 

writers of his day, and as in Hyperion he 
had disclosed something of his personal life 
under the veil of a romance, so in Kavanagh 
he made a pleasing rural story the vehicle 
for carrying reflections and opinions which 
he wished once for all to be rid of. He had 
done with reviewing and prose work in gen- 
eral ; whatever he did now must be in some 
form of art, and Kavanagh seems to have 
answered its purpose of materializing the 
floating forms which had been in its author's 
vision for many years. After this he used 
the economy of a wise artist, and worked in 
that material and in those forms which most 
completely satisfied the bent of his genius. 

Yet Kavanagh^ in another aspect, is inter- 
esting for its witness to a controlling prin- 
ciple in Longfellow's art. When Michael 
Angelo, in Longfellow's posthumous poem, 
holds discourse from the vantage-ground of 
age with the volatile Benvenuto Cellini, his 
counsel to the younger man is mingled with 
pathetic reflections upon his own relations to 
art. He cannot leave Rome for Florence ; 
he is under the spell which affects one like 
malaria : — 

" Malaria of the mind 
Out of this tomb of the majestic Past ; 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 61 

The fever to aceomplisli some great work 
That will not let us sleep. I must go on 
Until I die." 

So he speaks, and to Benvenuto's reminder 
of the memories which cluster about the 
pleasant city upon the Arno, he replies, 
musing : — 

* ' Pleasantly 
Come back to me the days when, as a youth, 
I walked with Ghirlandajo in the g-ardens 
Of Medici, and saw the antique statues, 
The forms august of g-ods and g-odlike men, 
And the great world of art revealed itself 
To my young eyes. Then all that man hath done 
Seemed possible to me. Alas ! how little 
Of all I dreamed of has my hand achieved ! " 

The caution against mistaking a poet's 
dramatic assumption for his own character 
and expression is of less force in the case 
of one in whom the dramatic power was so 
slightly developed ; and the whole poem of 
Michael Angelo, taken in connection with 
the time and circumstances of its composi- 
tion, may fairly be regarded as in some re- 
spects Longfellow's apologia pro vita sua. 
Michael Angelo rehearsing his art is dra- 
matically conceived, and there is no lapse 
into the poet's own speech ; for all that, and 
because of that, the reader is always aware 
of the presence of Longfellow, wise, calm, 



62 MEN AND LETTERS 

reflective, musing over the large thouglits 
of life and art. " I want it," tlie poet says 
in his diary, " for a long and delightful oc- 
cupation," and he treated himself to the 
luxury of keeping the work by him, brood- 
ing over it, shaping it anew, adding, chang- 
ing, discarding. 

" Quickened are they that touch the Prophet's bones," 

he says in his Dedication^ and it may easily 
be believed that with no great scheme of 
verse haunting him, with no sense of incom- 
pleted plans, he would linger in the twilight 
of his poetic life over the strong figure of 
the artist thus called up before him, and be 
kindled with a new poetic glow as he con- 
templated the great artist. For Michael 
Angelo in the poem is the virile character 
of the robust Italian seen in a softened, 
mellow light. We are not probably far 
astray when we say that Longfellow, in 
building this poem and reflecting upon it 
during the last ten years of his life, was 
more distinctly declaring his artistic creed 
than in any other of his works, and that the 
discussions which take place in the poem, 
more especially Michael Angelo's utterances 
on plastic or graphic art, had a peculiar in- 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 63 

terest for liim as bearing upon analogous 
doctrines of poetic art. 

Now the great sculptor is made to speak 
in his old age of 

" The fever to accomplisli some great work, 
That will not let us sleep." 

If there was any such fever in Longfel- 
low's case, as I think the writing of Michael 
Angela intimates, there certainly was from 
the beginning of his career a most healthy 
and normal activity of life, which stirred 
him to the achievement of great works, in 
distinction from the familiar, frequent exer- 
cise of the poetic faculty. That lovely lyric, 
The Arrow and the Song, which might well 
stand as a prelude to Longfellow's shorter 
poems, is headed in the complete edition by 
an extract from the author's diary : " Be- 
fore church wrote The Arrow and the So7ig, 
which came into my mind as I stood with 
my back to the fire, and glanced on to the 
paper with arrow's speed. Literally an im- 
provisation." The spontaneity of his art is 
again and again illustrated by just such 
lyrics as this, and no one can follow these 
shorter flights of song in connection with 
Longfellow's life without being impressed 
by the ease with which they sped from his 



64 MEN AND LETTERS 

bow and the directness of their aim. But 
to see this is to see only one side of Long- 
fellow's artistic power. One needs also to 
keep in mind the seriousness with which he 
regarded his art, and the clear purpose al- 
ways in his mind to build large and strong. 
It is not impossible that his several attempts 
at dramatic composition may have been due 
in part to this temper which impelled him 
to use all his strength, and to justify his 
gift of song by something more than swal- 
low dips. Hyperion was necessary to his 
mind, though he might have broken up 
much of the work into independent, minor 
sketches. Scarcely had he been reborn to 
poetry before he was at work on The Span- 
ish Studjent, He was then also projecting 
Ohristus, and evidently feeling the weight 
of the great theme. The length of time 
which it remained in his mind is an illustra- 
tion of the large circle on which his thought 
sailed, and his poetic career is marked to 
the end by the deliberate inception, elabora- 
tion, and completion of great works. 

There is an aspect of Longfellow's art 
which especially interests men of letters. I 
mean the relation which it bore to his liveli- 
hood. In one of his letters, written when 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 6o 

leaving college, lie intimates that if his fa- 
ther insists upon his adopting a profession, 
he may accept the law. " I can be a lawyer," 
he says ; "• this will support my real exist- 
ence, literature an ideal one." As it turned 
out, he was able to earn his living by a pur- 
suit which was more directly akin to liter- 
ature. For about twenty-five years he was 
bound by the exacting duties of a professor- 
ship, first at Bowdoin, afterward at Harvard. 
When he came to retire at last from his 
chair in the university, he wrote in his diary : 
" I am now free ! But there is a good deal 
of sadness in the feeling of separating one's 
self from one's former life." 

This was the formal separation. The real 
cessation of college work had taken place a 
few months earlier. But in the diary of 
the closing years of his connection with the 
college there are many signs of a growing 
weariness and a desire to be relieved of irk- 
some duties. His function as a professor 
seems always to have been subordinate in 
his own consciousness, but never to have 
been slighted. More than that, his literary 
faculty distinctly reenforced his professional 
power. Apparently he brought to his work 
in the college no special love of teaching, 



66 MEN AND LETTERS 

nor, so far as we can see, any special gift of 
exegesis ; lie brought something, however, 
that was rare in his position and of great 
value, — a deep love of literature and that 
unacademic attitude toward his work which 
was a liberalizing power. 

Nor, on the other hand, can we say that 
his work in the college was of serious disad- 
vantage to him as a man of letters. It is 
probable that he found in poetry a relief 
from the routine of his life, and that the 
business which compelled him gave a cer- 
tain stability to his course, making it possi- 
ble for him to keep poetry always like a 
pure flame leading him forward. At any 
rate, it is to be observed that during these 
twenty-five years, naturally the most fruitful 
in a poet's life, he wrote the poems which 
fixed his place on Parnassus. It was just at 
the turning-point that he wrote Hiawatha^ 
but he had already written Evangeline^ and 
those poems of hope and confidence to which 
he gave the name of psalms. 

Still, in relinquishing his position as pro- 
fessor, Longfellow was not simply consulting 
his personal ease ; he was obeying that law 
of his higher nature which bade him cast 
off all impediments to a free exercise of his 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 67 

power as an artist. We are told that he 
disliked everything violent, and that this 
hatred of noise was a trait of his character 
from earliest days. It is easy to believe 
this, for one cannot read his Life or study 
his works without being made aware of an 
atmosphere created by the poet himself. 
There was no mere avoidance of disturb- 
ing elements, nor was his serenity the result 
of favoring conditions ; his nature asserted 
itself in a resolute compulsion of condi- 
tions, — 

" Annihilating all that *s made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

" We lead but one life here on earth," he 
writes in his diary. " We must make that 
beautiful. And to do this, health and elas- 
ticity of mind are needful ; and whatever en- 
dangers or impedes these must be avoided." 
This last entry lets a little light into the 
poet's temperament. That calm sweetness 
of spirit, which is so apparent in Longfel- 
low, was an acquisition as well as an endow- 
ment. He deliberately chose and refrained 
according to a law in his members, and took 
clear cognizance of his nature and its ten- 
dencies. 

In a word, he was a sane man. There 



68 MEN AND LETTERS 

was a notable sanity about all Ms mode of 
life, and his attitude toward books and na- 
ture and men. It was the positive which 
attracted him, the achievement in litera- 
ture, the large, seasonable gifts of the outer 
world, the men and women themselves who 
were behind the deeds and words which 
made them known. The books which he 
read, as noted in his journals, were the gen- 
erous books ; he wanted the best wine of 
thought, and he avoided criticism. He 
basked in sunshine ; he watched the sky, 
and was alive to the great sights and sounds 
and to all the tender influences of the sea- 
sons. In his intercourse with men, this 
sanity appeared in the power which he 
showed of preserving his own individuality 
in the midst of constant pressure from all 
sides ; he gave of himself freely to his inti- 
mate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in 
a charmed circle, beyond the lines of which 
men could not penetrate. Praise did not 
make him arrogant or vain ; criticism, 
though it sometimes wounded him, did not 
turn him from his course. It is rare that 
one in our time has been the centre of so 
much admiration, and still rarer that one 
has preserved in the midst of it all that in- 
tegrity of nature which never abdicates. 



LONGFELLOW AND HIS ART 69 

It is too early to make a full survey of 
the immense importance to American letters 
of the work done by half a dozen great men 
in the middle of this century. The body of 
prose and verse created by them is consti- 
tuting the solid foundation upon which other 
structures are to rise ; the humanity which 
it holds is entering into the life of the coun- 
try, and no material invention, or scientific 
discovery, or institutional prosperity, or ac- 
cumulation of wealth will so powerfully af- 
fect the spiritual well-being of the nation for 
generations to come. The reason lies deep 
in the lives of the men who have wrought, 
independently, at laying this foundation. In 
the case of Longfellow, the gift of nature 
which made him an artist to his finger-tips 
was reenforced by that broad, free study 
which enriched his mind with a multitude 
of familiar figures and forms, and behind 
all lay a sane, reverent character which con- 
stantly obeyed the impulse to work, to create, 
to be. 



A MODEKN PROPHET. 

Mr. Ford Madox Brown, in a large 
picture entitled Work, wMcli lie exhibited in 
London twenty years or more ago, introduced 
two figures, whom he thus described in the 
entertaining catalogue which accompanied 
his exhibition : " These are the brain-work- 
ers, who, seeming to be idle, work, and are 
the cause of well-ordained work and happi- 
ness in others. Sages, such as in ancient 
Greece, published their opinions in the mar- 
ket square. Perhaps one of these may al- 
ready, before he or others know it, have 
moulded a nation to his pattern, converted 
a hitherto combative race to obstinate passiv- 
ity ; with a word may have centupled the tide 
of emigration, with another have quenched 
the political passions of both factions, — 
may have reversed men's notions upon crim- 
inals, upon slavery, upon many things, and 
still be walking about little known to some. 
The other, in friendly communion with the 
philosopher, smiling, perhaps, at some of his 



A MODERN PROPHET 71 

wild sallies and cynical thrusts (for Socrates 
at times strangely disturbs the seriousness of 
his auditory by the mercilessness of his jokes 
— against vice and foolishness), is intended 
for a kindred and yet very dissimilar spirit : 
a clergyman, such as the Church of England 
offers examples of, — a priest without guile, 
a gentleman without pride, much in commun- 
ion with the working classes, 'honoring all 
men,' ' never weary in well-doing ; ' scholar, 
author, philosopher, and teacher, too, in his 
way, but not above practical efforts, if even 
for a small amount in good, deeply pene- 
trated as he is with the axiom that each unit 
of humanity feels as much as all the rest 
combined, and impulsive and hopeful in na- 
ture, so that the remedy suggests itself to 
him concurrently with the evil." 

The former of these two characters, who 
in the picture stand watching some navvies 
at work, was Thomas Carlyle ; the latter, 
Frederick Denison Maurice. The painter, 
with that insight which belongs to his art, 
associated two men who were, in point of 
fact, not very closely connected in society, 
yet who are likely to be mentioned in the 
same breath by any one hereafter who takes 
into account the individual spiritual forces 



72 MEN AND LETTERS 

of modern England, It has been the fashion 
to call Carlyle a new John the Baptist, and 
it has been cleverly said that he led Eng- 
lishmen into the desert and left them there. 
If one chooses to push the comparison far- 
ther, and to say that he who is least in the 
kingdom of heaven is greater than John the 
Baptist, he will find in Maurice an exemplar 
of the prophets who belong distinctly to the 
new dispensation. Indeed, an enthusiastic 
disciple has declared that the great distinc- 
tion of Maurice was that he rediscovered 
the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. Herr 
Brentano, the professor of political economy 
at Strasburg, was of the opinion that Maurice 
" was evidently marked out by his whole na- 
ture to exercise the influence of an apostle." 
It is a more exact description of his func- 
tion in modern English history to call him, 
as I do, a prophet. 

In using this term I bear in mind that 
conception of prophecy which Maurice him- 
self did so much in his writings to reclaim. 
The difference between the large idea of 
prophecy which prevailed in his mind and 
that restricted notion which makes Mr. Ven- 
nor or Zadkiel the chief of the prophets was 
the difference of a single letter. The popu- 



A MODERN PROPHET 73 

lar view of a prophet is one who /ore tells ; 
that of Mr. Maurice, of the English theolo- 
gians of the seventeenth century, and there- 
fore of the translators of the Bible, was of 
one who for-tells. The prophet, in their con-' 
ception, is one who speaks for God ; and the 
great function of the Jewish prophets was 
not to furnish predictions which should at 
some future time be fulfilled and astonish 
skeptics, but to declare that mind of God 
which rests in eternal righteousness and ex- 
presses itself through the workings of human 
will. That prophecy should have its pre- 
dictive side is a consequence of the immu- 
table properties of the divine nature and the 
freedom of the human. The word of God 
must have its final expression in man's con- 
duct ; but it is not a thaumaturgic word, and 
the process by which it accomplishes its ends 
is a process in time. 

It is the first condition of true prophecy 
that the prophet himself should be conscious 
of his vocation, and therefore of the God 
who uses him for a mouthpiece. Out of this 
consciousness of an immanent God springs 
that double sense of profound humility and 
unfaltering courage. The prophet is not a 
passive instrument, a pipe for God's fingers 



74 MEN AND LETTERS 

to sound what stops He pleases ; and yet the 
highest expression of prophetic power is ac- 
companied by the most perfect subjection of 
the will. Now Maurice was at once the most 
humble of men and the most confident in the 
delivery of his message from God to man. 
The whole course of his life reveals him as 
utterly indifferent to his own fame, social 
position, or personal advantage ; as wholly 
occupied with the great truths of God of 
which he was the recipient. Woe is me, he 
seems always to be declaring, if I preach not 
the gospel ; but, unlike some who take up 
the same strain, it was not the gospel of woe 
which he felt constrained to preach. 

The incidents of his life are easily summed. 
John Frederick Denison Maurice was born 
in 1805. His father was a Unitarian min- 
ister whose character seems to have been 
cast somewhat in the mould in which the 
son's was formed. Maurice was a student at 
Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor 
was Julius Hare and his bosom friend was 
John Sterling. He did not take his degree, 
from conscientious scruples against signing 
the thirty-nine Articles, and went up to Lon- 
don, where he engaged in literary pursuits 
in company with Sterling. Of Maurice's 



A MODERN PROPHET 75 

influence on Sterling, Sterling himself writes : 
" Of what good you have found in the Athe- 
nceum by far the larger part is attributable 
to Maurice. When I have done any good, 
I have seldom been more than a patch of 
sand to receive and retain the impression of 
his footsteps." Mulford once said to me 
that there were two Englishmen who might 
have written history to some purpose, De 
Quincey and Maurice. I suppose he was 
thinking of their insight, their power to de- 
tect the undercurrents of historic movement, 
a power which lets in a flood of light upon 
what otherwise seem unrelated facts. The 
Athenceum in noticing this period of Mau- 
rice's activity said : '' Had Mr. Maurice 
finally resolved to abide in literature as his 
calling, he would have been the author of 
many rich suggestions and discoveries in the 
fields of criticism and history, and the world 
might have found in him a second Erasmus, 
but with a courage and faith and passionate 
devotion to truth, which are conspicuous by 
their absence in the first one." 

Maurice knew himself better. He had no 
art, no sense of form, and without art a man 
of letters is without his distinctive mark. 
He had the genius of a worker, and it was 



76 MEN AND LETTERS 

in the ministry that he saw his most effective 
working-place. He entered the church, tak- 
ing his degree at Oxford, for he had discov- 
ered, as he believed, an eirenicon in the 
Church of England, and thenceforward his 
work was within its pale, though he refused 
to accept the interpretation of the Church 
and its belief which were held by many of 
the Doctors of the Church. The school of 
thinking in which he would be placed re- 
ceived its special foundation, speculatively 
in Coleridge, practically in Arnold; and of 
those with whom he may be classed, Rob- 
ertson, the brothers Hare, Tennyson, and 
Charles Kingsley are the most notable. He 
was successively chaplain of Guy's Hospital, 
chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, Incumbent of St. 
Peter's, Yere Street, and at the time of his 
death held the chair of Casuistry and Moral 
Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. 
He was also at one time Professor of Di- 
vinity in King's College, London, but was 
driven from his place by the theological 
opposition of the authorities. Much of his 
work was in connection with the Working 
Men's College of London. 

His writings illustrate the leading interests 
of his life, for they may all be said to have 



A MODERN PROPHET 77 

been instruments which he handled for di- 
rect and specific purposes not containing the 
end in themselves. Their leading character- 
istic is the use of spiritual truths in the solu- 
tion of problems of life, whether those prob- 
lems are stated in terms of politics, religious 
and social observance, or morals. Indeed, 
nothing impresses one more in reading the 
writings of this man than the absence of 
customary boundary lines in thought. He 
has not one method for the investigation of 
scientific questions, and another for casuis- 
try ; he does not regard politics and religion 
as independent and separate provinces of 
thought and action ; and therefore it is that 
in preaching to Englishmen, he speaks to 
Englishmen and not distinctively to mem- 
bers of the Church of England, any more 
than he would, if addressing a political gath- 
ering, speak to voters. Therefore it is also 
that his labors amongst working men always 
had a power springing from his recognition 
of them as a constituent part of the State, 
and not as members of a social class. 

To speak briefly, Maurice shows in his 
writings a constant desire to get at the broad, 
fundamental experience of humanity. He 
recognizes social and religious differences in 



78 MEN AND LETTERS 

men only to point out more clearly tlie real 
likeness. What he has to say is said to his 
brethren ; and exclusiveness, whether in re- 
ligion or society, seems to him the gravest 
peril of Church or State. The practical 
temper of his mind led him to put his work 
into action, as I said, rather than into lit- 
erature. His books are tracts, generally, 
rather than treatises, suggested by immedi- 
ate needs, yet always bottomed on large, com- 
prehensive principles. He is careless of 
mere scholastic distinctions ; he writes to 
get at the heart of things. He uses litera- 
ture for an end, and does not make an end 
of literature itself. One begins to read 
his writings with the expectation of finding 
eventually some definite system of thought 
to which they may be referred, but discovers 
at last that Maurice is not a systematic the- 
ologian; that he has positive conviction, a 
determinate faith, but has never formally 
abstracted it from its place as a motive power 
and given it a dogmatic shape. The person- 
ality of the man, hopeful and solemn, large 
and candid, yet sometimes sarcastic and 
slightly contemptuous, is impressed upon his 
writings and must have been a strong influ- 
ence in the society which surrounded him. 



A MODERN PROPHET 79 

He has been the cause of much thought in 
others, both in England and America, but I 
suspect his writings will be read less and 
less, while his personality will be studied 
more and more. 

The main source of knowledge, as his con- 
temporaries pass away, will probably be in 
the Z/ife, based upon his correspondence, is- 
sued by his son, Colonel Frederick Maurice, 
who was in sympathy with his father. Col- 
onel Maurice tells us that his father main- 
tained that no man's life should be written 
until he had been dead twenty years. Mau- 
rice died ten years before the Life appeared, 
but for American readers the half score is 
as good as a score. We are sufficiently re- 
moved from the smoke of the battle in which 
so much of his life was spent to be able to 
view the combat with serenity, and the figure 
of this remarkable man becomes one of the 
most conspicuous in the scene. He was not 
a leader of a party ; he was a leader of men. 
A keen Englishman who had boxed the com- 
pass of religious winds said sneeringly to me 
a few years ago that there were then only 
two out-and-out disciples of Maurice in Lon- 
don. Maurice himself would have been 
eager to dissuade the two from fancying that 



80 MEN AND LETTERS 

lie carried any banner under whicli tliey 
could be marshalled. 

To return to my preferable epithet, lie was 
a prophet. What, then, was the message 
which this modern prophet delivered to men ? 
It is discovered in every page of the books 
which he published, and is still further iUus- 
ti'ated in a variety of forms in the Life. 
" His whole conception of preaching,"' says 
his biographer, " was the setting forth of 
Christ as the manifestation of the di\*ine 
character; as the revelation, unveiling, or 
makino' known to man the actual rio-hteous- 
ness and love of God. This was the gospel 
or o'ood news which he believed that he had 
to preach. He believed that in proportion 
as men in private life or in history came to 
have a higher ideal of any kind, that ideal 
was in itself a more perfect knowledge of 
the nature of God, arrived at through the 
manifestation of the Son, the Word, in life 
or history." "I know I was formed,'' says 
Maurice himself, '' in the image of God. I 
believe if I coidd behold God I shoidd re- 
flect His imao'e. But I cannot behold Him. 
God, I am told, is a spirit, and I am of the 
earth, earthy. I cannot, and would not if I 
could, abandon my belief that He is a lofty 



A MODERN PROPHET 81 

spiritual being ; I cannot throw aside my own 
eartliliness. Now tliis seems to me tlie most 
important practical question in the world. I 
cannot put up with a dream in place of God. 
He is a spirit, but He is a reality ; a true 
beino' in the hio'hest sense. As such I must 
behold Him, or not at all. To behold Him, 
therefore, in that way in which they could 
alone imderstand Him, in which they could 
converse with Him, namely, as a man, was, 
I see more and more clearly, the longing de- 
sire of every patriarch, prophet, and priest, 
from Adam doTVTiward. It was the desire 
of Moses, of Job, of David, of Solomon, of 
Isaiah ; they were practical men, and they 
wanted a practical revelation, — a revelation 
which they could understand and grapple. 
God, they knew, must be forever the un- 
searchable, the mysterious. They would not 
for worlds He shoidd be anything else ; for 
it was the glory of Judaism that their God 
was not a visible, intelligible idol, but an 
incomprehensible spirit. Yet they longed to 
behold Him, and to behold Him so that they 
could understand Him." 

This concentration of his belief in God 
rather than about God, and the intensity of 
his conviction that God was revealed in the 



82 MEN AND LETTERS 

incarnation, made Maurice a prophet, and 
explains the whole course of his life. It ex- 
plains his personal character, for the habit 
of direct intercourse with its Deliverer af- 
forded a test of conduct far more potent 
than any code of ethics, however lofty. It 
explains his attitude toward the Church, the 
Bible, and, above all, toward the men and 
women about him. It was impossible for 
him to regard his personal relation to God 
as an exclusive one. The very intensity of 
his belief in God as the Father and in Christ 
as the head of man made him have a pas- 
sionate longing for a unity in the visible re- 
lations of men to one another which should 
correspond to the eternal unity which sub- 
sisted in the divine order. Hence his ex- 
treme sensitiveness to any course which 
would identify him with party in Church or 
State constantly isolated him from men with 
whom he worked most cheerfully. It led 
him into an almost morbid suppression of 
himself, lest he should seem to be a leader. 
" I am a cold-blooded animal," he writes to 
Mr. Ludlow, who had reproved him in his 
hasty way for checking the ardor of an asso- 
ciate ; " very incapable, I know, of entering 
into the enthusiasm of better men, and often 



A MODERN PROPHET 83 

likely to discourage tliem greatly. The con- 
sciousness of this often keeps me aloof from 
them, as I feel I am doing them harm. But 
I have sometimes thought that I might be of 
use in warning those for whom I feel a deep 
and strong interest against a tendency which 
I feel in myself, and which I have seen pro- 
ducing most melancholy effects. I mean a 
tendency to be quick-sighted in detecting all 
errors in the schemes of other men, and to 
set up their own in opposition to them. Oh, 
the bitter scorn which I have seen Newman- 
ites indulging at the schemes of Evangel- 
icals ! — scorn in which I have been well in- 
clined to join ; and now the frost which has 
come on themselves, their incapacity of all 
healthy action ! I could get the good-will of 
you all very soon by flattering that habit of 
mind, and I am very often tempted to do it. 
But God will not let me, and therefore He 
will not let me ever be the leader or sub- 
leader of any school or party in this land. 
For the only condition of the existence of 
such a school or party is the denunciation 
and execration of every other. I find myself 
becoming more and more solitary. I see 
that I am wide as the poles from Hare about 
the baptismal question. He wishes to make 



84 MEN AND LETTERS 

every one comfortable in the Churcli ; and I 
want no one to be comfortable in it, so cross- 
grained am I. Yet I seek for unity in my 
own wild way." " I have laid a great many 
addled eggs in my time," he said once to his 
son, " but I think I see a connection through 
the whole of my life that I have only lately 
begun to realize ; the desire for unity and the 
search after unity, both in the Nation and 
the Church, has haunted me all my days." 

The ideal which a man sets before him is 
the measure of his life, if that ideal is never 
shattered by the man's own loss of faith. 
In Maurice's case, this search for unity was 
carried on to the end, in spite of apparently 
overwhelming odds. His early days were 
spent in a religious society which was fall- 
ing to pieces about him. His father's fam- 
ily went through a process of disintegration 
of faith which is dramatic in its singular 
rapidity and completeness. The figure of 
the Rev. Michael Maurice, deserted in suc- 
cession by all the members of his household, 
is a most pathetic one. Yet all this experi- 
ence lay at the basis of Frederick Maurice's 
passionate devotion to his ideal. It was out 
of this chaos that there arose in his mind a 
conception of order which never failed him. 



A MODERN PROPHET 85 

It centred in God, and found its expression 
in those terms, the Word of God, the Fam- 
ily, the Nation, the Church, which were to 
be constantly charged with a meaning in his 
writings and speech that made them a stum- 
bling-block to men who were ready enough 
to use shibboleths as expressions of their 
creed. Scarcely had Maurice found his foot- 
hold in that large place, from which he never 
was moved, before he was brought into con- 
tact with a church which appeared to be 
breaking up into schools and parties, and 
with a society which was avowedly atheistic, 
as well as one more dangerously pharisaic. 
These conditions never shook his faith in 
unity, and his prophetic function was to de- 
clare a church and a nation which were wit- 
nesses to God. " If ever I do any good 
work," he writes, " and earn any of the 
hatred which the godly in Christ Jesus re- 
ceived and have a right to, it must be in the 
way I have indicated : by proclaiming so- 
ciety and humanity to be divine realities as 
they standi not as they may become, and by 
calling upon the priests, kings, prophets of 
the world to answer for their sin in having 
made them unreal by separating them from 
the living and eternal God, who has estab- 



86 MEN AND LETTERS 

lished them in Christ for His glory. This is 
what I call digging ; this is what I oppose 
to building. And the more I read the Epis- 
tle to the Corinthians, the more I am con- 
vinced that this was St. Paul's work, the 
one by which he hoped to undermine and to 
unite the members of the ApoUos, Cephas, 
Pauline, and Christian (for those who said, 
' We are of Christ ' were the worst canters 
and dividers of all) schools. Christ the ac- 
tual foundation of the universe, not Christ 
a Messiah to those who received him and 
shaped him according to some notion of 
theirs ; the head of a body, not the teacher 
of a religion, was the Christ of St. Paul. 
And such a Christ I desire to preach, and 
to live in, and die in." 

It is not surprising that Maurice, attempt- 
ing, in his happy phrase, to undermine and 
unite all parties, found himself outside of 
all and attacked by all. He would not have 
been a prophet if he had not been driven 
into the wilderness more than once. That 
did not stop his prophesying, and every time 
that he was thus expelled multitudes fol- 
lowed him. His biographer, in speaking of 
the burst of recognition which Maurice's 
services received after his death, says, " It 



A MODERN PROPHET 87 

was said to me, by more than one man, at 
tlie time, that the spontaneity and universal- 
ity of the feeling was so marked that there 
did not seem to them to have been anything 
like it in England since the Duke of Wel- 
lington's death." Similar outbursts came 
during Maurice's life-time, — on the occa- 
sion of his expulsion from his theological 
professorship in King's College, for exam- 
ple ; but for the most part he was misrep- 
resented and reviled by the religious press. 
For it was against the bitter exclusiveness 
and arrogance which found their worst ex- 
pression in these journals that Maurice 
waged an untiring warfare. The truth 
which he maintained was sharper than a 
two-edged sword, and made many divisions. 
He would not have been a prophet, again, 
if he had not possessed a fiery indignation 
against all who shut up God in any one of 
the cages of human insolence, or who would 
make traffic of divine things. Colonel Mau- 
rice cites a striking instance of this indig- 
nation. His father was present at a club 
when the question under discussion was the 
subscription of the clergy. 

" In the course of it a member of Parlia- 
ment, a strict adherent of the religion of the 



88 MEN AND LETTERS 

hour, had been emphatically insisting upon 
the necessity of tightly tymg down the 
clergy to their belief in the current dogmas 
of the day, and of his particular school ; 
assuming throughout that just the creed of 
him and his friends was that which had al- 
ways and everywhere been held by all. 
Pointing out the shocks which this form of 
faith had been of late receiving from many 
quarters, and suggesting a doubt whether 
the clergy were really giving their money's 
worth of subserviency for the money paid 
to them, he had said, ' Sometimes one would 
like to know what the clergy do believe now- 
adays I ' 

" Every sentence had added fuel to the 
passionate indignation with which my father 
listened. It seemed to him just that claim 
to bind the clergy at the chariot wheels of 
public opinion against which he believed 
that the creeds, the articles, the fixed sti- 
pends of the clergy, the order of bishops as 
fathers in God, were so many protests. It 
seemed just that convenient getting rid of 
all belief in a living God, and safely dispos- 
ing of Him under a series of propositions, 
to be repeated at so much an hour, which 
he looked upon as the denial of the day. 



A MODERN PROPHET 89 

His growing excitement became so manifest 
that a note was passed up to Mr. Kempe by 
one of those sitting by, begging Mr. Kempe 
to call next on Mr. Maurice. My father 
rose, as all those who saw him say, ' on fire.' 

'Mr. asks what the clergy believe in 

nowadays. I believe in God the Father 
Almighty,' continuing the Apostles' Creed. 
Then he went on passionately to declare 
that because he so believed he was bound by 
his orders to protest against all appeals to 
money, to the praise of men, to the bargain- 
ing of the market, to the current run of 
popular feeling, as so many direct denials 
of truth, so many attempts to set up idols 
in place of the teaching of the living God. 
From all sides I have heard men say that it 
was one of the most striking things they 
had ever witnessed. Every one felt as if 
the place was in a blaze. No one else felt 
in any condition to speak, and the discus- 
sion abruptly ended." 

" There were times," says his biographer 
elsewhere, " when he could make his words 
sting like a lash and burn like a hot iron. 
The very nature of his appeal, always to a 
man's own conscience, to his sense of right 
within the scope in which the man himself 



90 MEN AND LETTERS 

clearly discerned wliat was right and what 
was wrong, the full recognition of ability 
when he complained that it was being 
abused, the utter absence of any desire to 
dictate in details or to require any conform- 
ity to his own opinions, seemed, as it were, 
when he spoke indignantly, to carry the 
man addressed, then and there, ' unhousel'd, 
disappointed, unanel'd,' before the tribunal 
with which rests ' the ultimate and highest 
decision upon men's deeds, to which all the 
unjustly condemned at human tribunals ap- 
peal, and which weighs not the deed only, 
but motives, temptations, and ignorances, 
and all the complex conditions of the deed.' 
There were some to whom he so spoke who 
never forgave him. The marvelous thing, 
considering the depth to which he sometimes 
cut, is that there were so few. 

" Whenever something that he looked 
upon as morally wrong or mean excited his 
wrath, he began in a most violent manner 
to rub together the palms of his two hands. 
The fits of doing so would often come on 
quite suddenly, as a result of his reflections 
on some action, as frequently as not of the 
religious world, or of so-called religious peo- 
ple. He appeared at such moments to be 



A MODERN PROPHET 91 

entirely absorbed in his own reflections, and 
utterly unconscious of the terrible effect 
which the fierce look of his face and the 
wild rubbing of his hands produced upon 
an innocent bystander. A lady, who often 
saw him thus, says that she always expected 
sparks to fly from his hands, and to see him 
bodily on fire. Certainly the effect was very 
tremendous, and by no means pleasant." 

This indignation appears more than once 
in Maurice's correspondence, but the pre- 
vailing impression upon the reader's mind 
is rather of the singular charity which he 
showed to all men, by virtue of which he 
frequently disconcerted those who were in 
opposition to him. For he would accept 
what his opponent said, place himself on the 
same side, and begin to argue the whole 
matter from a stand-point apparently inim- 
ical to himself. An amusing story of his 
gentleness and of his determination to rec- 
ognize the good is told apropos of his in- 
ability to manage a number of wild colts in 
the lecture room of King's College. A boy 
was disturbing the lecture. Maurice looked 
up, and after watching him for a few mo- 
ments said, "I do not know why that gen- 
tleman is doing what he is, but I am sure it 



92 MEN AND LETTERS 

is for some great and wise purpose ; and if 
he will come here and explain to us all what 
it is, we shall be delighted to hear him." 
This shows a habit of mind which even in 
sarcasm falls into its natural form of speech. 
The actual contribution which Maurice 
made to the development of philosophic or 
theologic thought does not consist in any 
treatise which may serve as an armory for 
polemic uses. The great power which he 
exercised over the minds of men was in his 
varied application of a few simple, profound 
truths. His distinction, for example, of the 
idea of eternal from that of everlasting, 
while not original with him, was in his 
hands a candle with which he lighted many 
dark passages. His controversy with Man- 
sel showed him inferior to his antagonist in 
logical fence ; but what with Mansel was a 
philosophic position was with Maurice a ter- 
ribly practical truth, and he was constantly 
expressing it, not in terms of philosophy, 
but in terms of history, politics, and ethics. 
It was the illuminating power of truth which 
Maurice knew how to use. Many a student 
of his writings has gone to them for an ex- 
egesis of some passage of the Bible, and 
come away with a revelation which put to 



A MODERN PROPHET 93 

shame his small measures of textual truth. 
It is a favorite advice of commentators, 
Study the context ; but Maurice's context 
was likely enough a piece of current Eng- 
lish history, or an extract from Plato. No 
theologian of recent days has so broken 
down middle walls of partition in the minds 
of men. 

It has rarely been given to men to see a 
few large truths so vividly as Maurice saw 
them, and at the same time to apply them 
to conduct and study with such vehement 
energy. Nevertheless, the very width of his 
vision may have led him to overlook a very 
present and near truth. In his anxiety to 
divest the idea of eternity of any time ele- 
ment, he missed, I think, that instinctive, 
or if not instinctive, then highly educated, 
conception of another world as a future 
world. He was right when he called back 
men from the postponement of moral conse- 
quences to a consideration of them in their 
essential properties, but he made too little 
of that reinforcement of the idea of eternity 
which comes through the sense of futurity. 
That sense is so imbedded in the conscious- 
ness as to revolt at last against the exclusive 
terms of Maurice's definitions. After all. 



94 MEN AND LETTERS 

the predictive function of the prophet be- 
longs to him, even if it be subordinate, and 
that Maurice should have disregarded its 
operation in his own case is all the more 
singular, since hope was so emphatically the 
key-note of his gospel. 



LANDOE AS A CLASSIC, 

Do readers, nowadays, resort to Landor's 
Imaginary Conversations ? Writers of Eng- 
lish respect tlie work so highly that it is a 
rarejhing for any one to attempt to imitate 
Landor in this form of composition. He in- 
vented a variation of literary form, and was 
so consummate ja master in it that it is al- 
most as if he had taken out a patent which 
cautious authors feared to infringe. Read- 
ers thus have a peculiar possession in the 
work, though I suspect that it is writers 
chiefly who have recourse to Landor, — that 
he is a literary man's author, as others have 
been poets of poets. 

The general reader who does not treat 
himself severely in the matter of reading 
may be expected to pass by some of the more 
recondite subjects and to rest at those vol- 
umes which contain the Dialogues of Liter- 
ary Men and Famous Women, and the Mis- 
cellaneous Dialogues. For while all the 
dialogues presuppose a knowledge of history 



96 MEN AND LETTERS 

and literature, the actors in tliese are most 
familiar to tlie reader, and the topics dis- 
cussed are neither so obscure nor so remote 
from common interest as are those presented 
in the other volumes. Not that Landor is 
ever exclusive in his interests ; it is the very 
reach of his sympathy which makes some of 
his dialogues more unreadable than others, 
for there are few humiliations to the inge- 
nuous reader of modern English literature 
deeper than that which awaits him when he 
tries to follow the lead of this remarkable 
writer, who passes without the sign of toil 
from converse with ancients to talk with 
moderns, and seems capable of displaying a 
wonderful puppet-show of all history. 

Perhaps the rankL_jrespectfully but with- 
out enthusiasm accorded to Landor is due 
mainly to the exactions which he makes of the 
reader. There must be omniscient readers 
for such an omniscient writer, and it cannot 
be denied that the ordinary reader takes his 
enjoyment of Landor with a certain stiffen- 
ing of his faculties ; he feels it impossible 
to read him lazily. The case is not very 
unlike that of a listener to music, who has 
not a musical education and has an honest 
delight in a difficult work, while yet per- 



LANDOR AS A CLASSIC 97 

fectly aware that he is missing, through his 
lack of technical knowledge, some of the fin- 
est expression. With classical works as with 
music, one commonly prefers to read what he 
has read before. Hamlet to the occasional 
reader of Shakespeare is like the Fifth Sym- 
phony to the occasional hearer of Beethoven. 
To ask him to read Landor is to ask him to 
hear Kalkbrenner, requiring him to form 
new judgments upon the old standard. 

The pleasure _whiphawai^^^ the trained 
reader, on taking up Landor, is very great. 
At first there is the breadth and sweetness 
of the style. To come upon it after the neg- 
ligence, the awkwardness, or the cheap bril- 
liancy of much that passes for good writing, 
is to feel that one has entered the society of 
one's intellectual superiors. One might al- 
most expect, upon discovering how hard Lan- 
dor rode his hobby of linguistic reform, to 
find conceits and archaisms, or fantastic ex- 
periments in language ; but as it was Lan- 
dor's respect for sound words which lay at 
the bottom of his inconsistent attempts to 
remove other inconsistencies, the same re- 
spect forbade him to use the English language 
as if it were an individual possession of his 
own. Neither can it be said that his famil- 



98 MEN AND LETTERS 

iarity witli Latin forms misled him into sol- 
ecisms in English ; here, again, the very 
perfection of his classical skill was turned to 
account in rendering his use of English the 
masterly employment of one of the dialects 
of all language. Yet, though there is no 
pedantry of a scholar perceptible in the Eng- 
lish style, the phrase falls upon the ear 
almost as a translation. It is idiomatic Eng- 
lish, yet seems to have a relation to other 
languages. This is partly to he referred to 
the subjects of many of the dialogues, partly 
to the dignity and scholarly tone of the work, 
but is mainly the result of the cast of mind 
in Landor, which was eminently classic, 
freed, that is, from enslaving accidents, yet 
always using with perfect fitness the charac- 
teristics which seem at a near glance to be 
merely accidents. This is well illustrated by 
those dialogues which are placed in periods 
strongly individualized, as the Elizabethan 
and the Puritan, or present speakers whose 
tone is easily caught when overheard. A 
weaker writer would, for example, mimic 
Johnson in the conversations which occur 
between him and Home Tooke ; Landor 
catches Johnson's tone without tickling the 
ear with idle sonorous phrases. A writer 



LAND OR AS A CLASSIC 99 

who bad read the dramatists freely, and set 
out to represent them in dialogue, would be 
very likely to use mere tricks of speech, 
but Landor carefully avoids all stucco orna- 
mentation, and makes the reader sure that 
he has overheard the very men themselves. 
It was the pride of Landoi^s design not to 
insert in any one of his conversations " a ) 
single sentence written by or recorded of 
the personages who are supposed to hold 
them." In the conversation between Lord 
Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney, he makes 
Sidney say, " To write as the ancients have 
written, without borrowing a thought or ex- 
pression from them, is the most difficult 
thing we can achieve in poetry ; " and the 
task which Landor set himself was an in- 
finitely higher and finer one than the merely 
ingenious construction of a closely joined 
mosaic. He has extended the lives of the 
men and women who appear in his dialogues. 
The faithfulness with which Landor has 
reproduced the voices of his characters fol- 
lows from the truthfulness of the characters, 
as they betray their natures in these conver- 
sations. This I have already intimated, and 
it is the discovery of the reader who pene- 
trates the scenes and is able in any case to 



100 MEN AND LETTERS 

compare the men and women of Landor with 
the same as they stand revealed in history 
or literature. The impersonations are neces- 
sarily outlined in conversation. Revelation 
through action is not granted, except occasion- 
ally in some such delicate form as hinted in 
the charming scene between Walton, Cotton, 
and Old ways. These delicate hints of action 
will sometimes escape the reader through 
their subtlety, but they tell upon the art of 
the conversations very strongly. Still, the 
labor of disclosing character is borne by the 
dialogue, and success won in this field is of 
the highest order. No one who uses conver- 
sation freely in novel- writing, when the talk 
is not to advance the incidents of the story, 
but to fix the traits of character held by the 
persons, can fail to perceive Landor's re- 
markable power. He deals, it is true, with 
characters already somewhat definitely exist- 
ing in the minds of his intelligent readers, 
yet he gives himself no advantage of a set- 
ting for his conversation, by which one might 
make place, circumstance, scenery, auxiliary 
to the interchange of sentiment and opinion. 
Perhaps the most perfect example of a con- 
versation instinct with meaning, and permit- 
ting, one may say, an indefinite column of 



LAN DOR AS A CLASSIC 101 

foot-notes, is the brief, exquisitely modulated 
one between Henry VIII. and Anne BoleynJ 
It may be that we have received the best 
good to be had from literature when we have 
been enabled to perceive men and women 
brightly, and to hold for a time before our 
eyes those who once were seen by persons 
more blessed only than we. Certain it is 
that to the solitary student, placed, it may 
be, in untoward circumstance, such a gift is 
priceless. But it belongs with this as a nec- 
essary accompaniment, if not a further good, 
to have such a discovery of character as 
comes through high thought and wise senti- 
ment. The persons whom Landor has viv- 
ified have burst their cerements for no mean 
purpose. They are summoned, not for idle 
chit-chat, but to speak words befitting them 
in their best moments. Southey is said tof 
have remarked on the conversation which he ! 
is made to hold with Porson, that they might 
not have conversed as Landor had shown 
them, "but we could neither of us have 
talked better." It is Landor's power not 
only to inhabit the characters, but to in- 
habit them worthily, that makes these books 
great. The subjects discussed are such as 
great-minded men might discuss, and it is 



102 MEN AND LETTERS 

when one marks the range of topics and the 
height to which the thought rises that he 
perceives in Land or a moralist as well as a 
dramatist. It is true that the judgments 
and opinions which he puts into the mouths 
of speakers partake of his own wayward, im- 
petuous nature, and it would not be hard to 
find cases where the characters clearly Lan- 
dorize, but the errors are in noble not in 
petty concerns. 

There is, doubtless, something of labor in 
reading Landor's Conversations if one is not 
conversant with high thinking, and if one is 
but slenderly endowed with the historic imag- 
ination, but the labor is not in the writing. 
The very form of conversation permits a 
quickness of transition and sudden shifting 
of subject and scene which enliven the art 
and give an inexhaustible variety of light 
and shade. One returns to passages again 
and again for their exceeding beauty of ex- 
pression and their exquisite setting. To one 
accustomed to the glitter of current epigram- 
matic writing, the brilliancy of some of Lan- 
dor's sentences may not at first be counted 
for its real worth, but to go from Landor to 
smart writers is to exchange jewels for paste. 

What I have said may serve partly to ex- 



/ 



LAN DOR AS A CLASSIC 103 

plain the limited audience which Landor has 
had and must contirme to have. If it is a 
liberal education to read his writings, it re- 
quires one to receiye them^freely. The ap- 
^al which Landor makes to the literary 
class_is very strong, and apart from a course 
of study in the Greek and Latin classics, I 
doubt if any single study would serve an au- 
thor so well as the study of Landor. Indeed, 
there is perhaps no modern work which 
gives to the reader not familiar with Greek 
or Latin so good an idea of what we call 
classical literature. Better than a transla- 
tion . is the original writing of Landor for 
conveying the aroma which a translation so 
easily loses. The dignity of the classics, the 
formality, the fine use of sarcasm, the con- 
sciousness of an art in literature, — all these 
are to be found in the Imaginary Conversa- 
tions ; and if a reader used to the highly 
seasoned literature of recent times complains 
that there is rather an absence of humor, 
and that he finds Landor sometimes dull, 
why. Heaven knows we do not often get hi- 
larious over our ancient authors, and Lan- 
dor, for his contemporaries, is an ancient 
author with a very fiery soul. 

A survey of all his work increases the 



104 MEN AND LETTERS 

admiration, not unmixed with fear, with 
which one contemplates the range of this 
extraordinary writer. The greatest of his 
dialogues are great indeed, but the facility 
with which he used this form betrayed him 
into employing it for the venting of mere 
vagaries, and the prolix discussion of topics 
of contemporary politics and history, by no 
means of general interest. Still, after all 
deductions are made, the work as a whole 
remains great, and I repeat that a study of 
Landor would be of signal service to any faith- 
ful man of letters. In his style he would 
discover a strength and purity which would 
constantly rebuke his own tendencies to ver- 
bosity and unmeaning phrases ; in the re- 
spect which Landor had for great writers he 
would learn the contemptible character of 
current irreverence in literature ; in the sus- 
tained flight of Landor' s thought he would 
find a stimulus for his own less resolute 
nature ; and as Landor was himself no imita- 
tor, so the student of Landor would discover 
how impossible it was to imitate him, how 
much more positive was the lesson to make 
himself a master by an unceasing reverence 
of masters and a fearless independence of 
inferiors. Landor is sometimes character- 



LAND OR AS A CLASSIC- 105 

ized as arrogant and conceited ; stray words 
and acts might easily be cited in support of 
this, but no one can read his Conversations 
intelligently and not perceive how noble was 
his scorn of mean men, how steadfast his 
admiration of great men. 



DR. MUHLENBERG. 

A BELIEF in Apostolic Succession does 
not preclude one from an independent belief 
in the continual appearance, even if in bro- 
ken succession, of apostles whose credentials 
are to be found in their apostolic life. It 
has seemed to some that Dr. Muhlenberg 
was a man born out of due time, and that 
there was an anachronism in his flourishing 
in the nineteenth century. Both his familiar 
friends and strangers were wont to remark 
on a certain likeness in character and pres- 
ence to S. John the Divine, and the repeti- 
tion by him in varying forms of that doctrine 
of Christian brotherhood which is so em- 
phatically announced in the older apostle's 
letters and gospel has made the comparison 
a natural one ; yet no one can read Dr. Muh- 
lenberg's Life^ as written by Sister Anne, 
and regard him as in any sense presenting 
an extinct or antiquated type of Christianity. 
The picturesqueness, so to speak, of his life, 
which has struck people so forcibly, had not 



DR. MUHLENBERG 107 

a particle of unreality about it : there was 
no assumption of some obsolete phase of 
religious manners, nor was there any mas- 
querading in devotion ; the genuineness of 
his nature was utterly opposed to anything 
of this sort, but there was in him a poetic 
sensibility which led him to appropriate 
whatever was native to him in historic Chris- 
tianity, and a poetic power which found 
expression less in verse than in a certain 
unique and very beautiful effort after the 
restoration of order in human life. He was a 
religious poet : but though his name in liter- 
ature is joined to one or two musical hymns, 
the true place to look for his art is in the 
memorial movement, in the cluster of char- 
ities of which the Church of the Holy Com- 
munion and S. Luke's Hospital are the 
centres, and in St. Johnland. In the incep- 
tion of these projects he showed the artist's 
power, as in their conception he had showed 
a poet's insight, and both the conceiving and 
the realization were marked by a genuine 
religious faith. 

It is the merit of this delightful biography 
that, while it is written with no singular 
skill, it is unusually transparent as a me- 
dium through which to reward a remarkable 



108 MEN AND LETTERS 

man. There are no marks of suppression 
by the biographer; apparently her single aim 
was to clear away whatever might withdraw 
attention from her subject, and the book 
thus leads the reader on to the close with an 
unflagging interest. It is rare indeed to 
find so unpretending and so successful a 
piece of biographic work. There was every- 
thing in the subject to tempt an ambitious 
writer into making a fine portrait ; as I 
have intimated, the character is so unique 
and its expression so original that it would 
have been easy to throw an air of improba- 
bility over the whole by emphasizing certain 
characteristics. As it is, the truthfulness of 
the picture is warranted by the unaffected- 
ness with which it is painted. 

It was Dr. Muhlenberg's fortune to be 
easily misunderstood. At a time when the 
church to which he belonged was timid and 
suspected, he used its liturgical stores with a 
freedom and an effectiveness which startled 
his associates, and upon the appearance of 
the Tractarian movement in the Church of 
England he was quickly identified with it in 
the minds of those who judged exclusively 
from a use of symbols and forms common to 
him and the English ritualists. He was 



DR. MUHLENBERG 109 

himself attracted by the revival in England 
of ecclesiastical aesthetics, and for a moment 
seemed ready to be drawn into the deeper 
currents of the stream ; but a resolute exam- 
ination of the ground on which he stood was 
followed by a more positive assertion of his 
acceptance of what is known as the evangel- 
ical creed. The simple courage and sincer- 
ity of the man were displayed in his refusal 
to abandon practices and forms which he 
held to be historical in the church, and not 
the exclusive property of the new party, 
although associated with the doctrines of 
that party in most people's minds. Thus he 
was looked upon with suspicion both by the 
sacerdotalists and the evangelicals. It was 
not that he steered a middle course between 
these extremes, but that in a perfectly mod- 
est and unobtrusive manner he asserted his 
independence, and gave free expression to 
his belief and his poetic nature. 

He was imagined by many also to be an 
unpractical enthusiast. The real truth was 
that Dr. Muhlenberg not only believed in the 
ideal which his generous and poetic nature 
perceived, but he regarded it as something 
to be made real, something of larger worth 
than dreams, and he had the patience and 



110 MEN AND LETTERS 

perseverance which put more practical men 
to shame. It was his magnificent faith which 
thus built S. Luke's Hospital and made it a 
real H6tel Dieu, and the picture which is 
given of his own residence there and pater- 
nal charge is exquisitely beautiful. So his 
latest, and we think his noblest, dream of St. 
Johnland was precisely one of those poetic 
fancies which have stirred men to hopes and 
aspirations, but furnished him with a solid 
scheme to be labored over and achieved. A 
village expressing Christian socialism in de- 
finite outline was the result, and while the 
Life does not furnish us with all the details 
which we could wish of this very interesting 
experiment, enough is displayed to make the 
picture of the founder upon his eightieth 
birthday something more than the graceful 
sketch of a king in no-man's land. An en- 
dowment fund of twenty thousand dollars 
had been raised in connection with St John- 
land, and it was desired to make it known to 
him on that birthday : — 

"He was induced to make the journey 
the evening before, so that he might be 
rested for the demands of the morrow. He 
rose bright and well the next morning at an 
early hour, and the first event of the day 



DR. MUHLENBERG 111 

was his acceptance, while yet in his chamber, 
of this grateful tribute. He was left alone 
with his emotions for a while ; then a choir 
of voices broke out in song on the green- 
sward northward of the house. Young and 
old had gathered below his windows at break 
of day, to wish him joy of his eighty years, 
in the native birthday lyric sacred to his 
anniversary. He threw up the sash and 
looked out. It was a beautiful sight. Every 
upturned face, standing a little aslant that 
they might see him the better, was illu- 
mined by the newly risen sun, and beaming 
also with the pleasure of his presence. 
Leaning forward a little, that he might take 
in the whole, his countenance irradiated 
with holy love and his arms stretched out 
and over them in unspoken benediction, he 
stood there awaiting the termination of their 
singing. Scarcely had the last word died 
upon their lips, when his own voice, strong 
and sonorous, led them in ' Praise God from 
whom all blessings flow.' Then came the 
Lord's Prayer in heartiest accord, followed 
by a fervent, soul - breathing benediction, 
after which they dispersed for breakfast in 
the several families, and every household 
later had a brief, sweet visit from him. . . . 



112 MEN AND LETTERS 

111 the afternoon came the ordinary festiv- 
ities of the founder's birthday for the whole 
settlement, in the fine old grove. It was 
thought that the previous exertions of the 
day would make him unable to be among 
his children there ; but in the midst of their 
hilarity, some one joyfully exclaimed, ' Why, 
there 's Dr. Muhlenberg ! ' He had walked 
up alone from the house, and was pausing a 
moment on the brow of the hill to gaze upon 
the scene. His slender form stood out 
strongly against the golden autumnal sky, 
the soft, rich hues of which were all in 
harmony with the ripe saintliness of his 
well-nigh perfected spirit. He joined the 
holiday-makers, and all went as merrily as if 
that were not the last time he and his St. 
Johnlanders would ever be together again 
upon earth." 

The institutions which he called into life 
may have a longer or shorter existence : 
they were built to endure, and they include 
principles which are no mere idle vagaries 
of an enthusiast ; but the longest life pos- 
sible to them can hardly add to the testimony 
which his character and ambition receive 
from them. The humility of the man, his 
unfeigned desire to serve, his ardent temper- 



DR. MUHLENBERG 113 

ament husbanding all resources for positive 
beneficence, and his nature freely giving of 
its own abundance through channels only 
dreamed of by others, — these have a per- 
ennial charm. And of how much greater 
worth to the Church is a man than an insti- 
tution ! There is, of course, a certain ab- 
surdity in the comparison, yet we are un- 
consciously given to elevating institutions as 
if they held, by virtue of their organization, 
an originating power ; and we are liable to 
be put out in our calculations by men and 
women, especially if they are endowed with 
genius. We are tempted to classify men, 
and then to refer results or movements to 
the party which seems to be the moving 
cause ; but, after all, we are obliged to re- 
member that not parties, but persons, consti- 
tute the Church. With what singular force 
the character and work of Dr. Muhlenberg 
recall us to the living power of a devoted, 
consecrated saint. I am not afraid to use 
the word of him ; he helps us to bring back 
the term to its apostolic significance, and to 
think of it, not as indicating a better man 
than the common run of men, but one set 
apart for divine service. Here was a saint 
who served, and the very originality of his 



114 MEN AND LETTERS 

service makes his character more powerful 
as an example. For the stimulus is, not to 
attempt the work which one feels was impos- 
sible to be copied, but to live the consecrated 
life which is as varied in its expression as 
humanity itself. Dr. Muhlenberg was a 
poet whose best lines were in the stones of 
the Church of the Holy Communion, the 
bricks of S. Luke's Hospital, and the broad 
acres of St. Johnland. That poetry was the 
work of genius, but the consecration of the 
poet is the hope and not the despair of men. 



AMERICAN HISTOEY ON THE 
STAGE. 

Public taste in America lias of late years 
taken two lines that have a tendency to con- 
verge into one, and I have been watching curi- 
ously to see what the result would be. Every 
one has observed the marked increase of 
interest in American history. The impetus 
was given by the anniversaries which clus- 
tered about the opening of a second century 
in national life. At these anniversaries 
great oratorical exhibitions were given, 
where men and women assisted with atten- 
tion and applause ; lectures, books, maga- 
zine articles, and public gatherings of various 
sorts attested the interest. The newspapers, 
reflecting the popular taste, gave an amount 
of space to historical subjects which would 
have buried them in bankruptcy if it had 
not been that the readers of newspapers 
wanted all that was given them. 

Not only this, but a vigorous effort has 
been made to reconstruct to the eye the his- 



116 MEN AND LETTERS 

toric past. We Lave had exhibitions of histor- 
ical curiosities, and a lively competition has 
been set up for the possession of historical 
bric-a-brac. Even our houses have rapidly 
acquired an historic imposture. People have 
put on their ancestors' clothes, and have tried 
by games, theatricals, tableaux, and masque- 
rades to see how the heroes looked who have 
suddenly come forward in such near perspec- 
tive. There is something almost pathetic in 
the eagerness with which, but a few years 
ago, everybody was centennial izing himself, 
and looking over his shoulder to catch a 
glimpse of the century behind him in the 
mirror which he held. How charmingly the 
young American girl slipped into the Revolu- 
tionary costume ! the only one of us, I am 
sure, who really reproduced the past. How- 
ells caught her at her gentle masquerading, 
and drew her portrait in his sonnet to Doro- 
thy Dudley, the feigned chronicler of the 
Cambridge of 1776 : — 

* ' Fair maiden, whom a hundred summers keep 
Forever seventeen, and whose dark locks 
Are whitened only from the powder-hox, 
After these many winters : on the steep 
Of high-heeled shoes, and with the silken sweep 

Of qnaint brocade, and an arch smile that mocks 
At Time's despite, thy lovely semblance walks. 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 117 

This year, our continent from deep to deep, 
At numberless Centennial Tea-Parties, 
With ehieken-salad, coffee, chocolate 

For retrospective youth, whose bosoms swell, 

Wlien they behold thee and thy pleasing freight. 
With love of country, and each patriot sees 

Thy charm in all that thou dost chronicle." 

Now the interest in this amiable masque- 
rade is part also of the new taste in theatri- 
cals. It would be quite as easy to show that 
the period which witnessed the Centennial 
fever saw also a great increase in dramatic 
entertainments of an amateur character. 
The theatre has its own history and devel- 
opment, dependent upon conditions often 
only remotely connected with other phases 
of social life ; and it does not follow, because 
there has been an extraordinary impulse 
given to private theatricals, that there has 
also been a corresponding popular interest 
in the regular stage. Yet there is a connec- 
tion between the two. Amateur theatricals 
educate audiences rather than actors. Now 
and then a person discovers a talent for act- 
ing by taking part in amateur performances, 
but it cannot be said that such performances 
are in any way a school for the stage. What 
we are justified in inferring is, that the in- 
creased activity in private dramatic enter- 



118 MEN AND LETTERS 

tainments points to a wider interest in the 
drama, a greater familiarity with plays, and 
an accession to the ranks of theatre-goers 
from a part of the community not hitherto 
especially given to frequenting the theatre. 

Generalizing on such a subject is usually 
only the writer's private impressions, so my 
assertion may be taken for what it is worth, 
that the readers of good literature have not, 
as a rule, in America, been supporters of the 
theatre, but that in this class there has 
sprung up of late a decided interest in the 
drama, and that this interest is to affect the 
stage. The adhesion of the literary class 

— both the writers and the readers of books 

— to the drama, which has gradually come 
about, is likely to cause a different order of 
plays, and in various respects to modify the 
present state of things. 

It must be remembered that Puritanism 
and literature combined have caused the 
theatre in England, and still more in Amer- 
ica, to hold a position which is not necessa- 
rily permanent. That is, the theatre has 
been made more exclusively a place of 
amusement than it has been in France, Italy, 
or Germany. The drama has been so far 
divorced from literature that we have been 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 119 

taught to make a distinction between plays 
to be acted and plays to be read, — a dis- 
tinction almost as irrational as songs to be 
recited and songs to be sung. Each has 
gone its own way and formed its own tradi- 
tion. The drama, thrown in upon itself, has 
been developed independently of literary 
influences. It has come to rely largely on 
stage effects ; that is, it has used the mate- 
rial at its disposal with reference to points 
of display, and has subordinated the text of 
the play to the actors, the scenery, and the 
dresses. It has turned novels which were 
dramatic into plays which excite the ridicule 
of the critics who praised the novels, and it 
has been dependent for its new blood either 
on translations or on dramatic artisanship, 
neither of which contains any real inspira- 
tion. It has allied itself with business 
rather than with letters, and a strong ten- 
dency has been shown toward the merely 
spectacular. 

On the other hand, literature, for lack of 
this healthful outlet, has been driven within 
narrower bounds ; has contracted its power, 
lost a fine faculty of expression, and tended 
to insulate society instead of making it 
mobile. Society, when intellectually occu- 



120 MEN AND LETTERS 

pied, miglit almost be pictured as a house- 
liold sitting in tlie evening around a table, 
with backs to tbe light, for the sake of sav- 
ing weak eyes, each reading to himself, " all 
silent," as Shelley says, — 

" All silent and all damned." 

Shut out from the stage, literature has tried 
to make itself vivid through other forms. 
The novel, in the hands of Dickens and his 
school, was distinctly affected by the effort 
to introduce stage effects by merely mental 
processes ; and it is largely owing to the 
same cause that literature has developed a 
farcical quality of humor, — the painful ef- 
fort of a book to do what a comedian does 
easily with a contortion of face. 

Now, in the popular awakening to the 
worth of American history, in the new inter- 
est felt by educated people in the drama, 
may there not be discovered a restoration 
of old relations between literature and the 
stage, too long dissevered ? Such a combi- 
nation, of literary and dramatic forces must 
depend for permanence upon the audience, 
and it is the audience which has been in 
process of education. The principal facts 
and personages in American history are 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON TEE STAGE 121 

every year becoming more positively a part 
of the furniture of the average mind, and 
there is a more familiar acquaintance with 
what may be called the scenery and proper- 
ties of history through the aid of museums, 
collections, exhibitions, pictures, and picture- 
books. It is from this common acquaint- 
ance with history that any popular appre- 
ciation will come of literary work which is 
based upon history. What is it in art that 
makes subjects drawn from the Bible so 
quickly received by the people, except that 
familiarity with the book whicdi renders it 
unnecessary for the artist to add a literary 
commentary to his picture ? And when 
American history is a household tale, then 
we may look for a ready appreciation of lit- 
erature suggested by it. The concentration 
of attention, in manifold ways, upon this 
subject, in schools and among young people 
generally, is rapidly preparing the ground 
for a literature which shall react upon the 
subjects treated, and make history a still 
more real and interesting thing to common 
people. The rehabilitation of the stage 
opens a conspicuous field for the exercise of 
these forces. 

Granting the possibility of a time, which 



122 MEN AND LETTERS 

for my own pleasure I will make near at 
hand, when author, audience, and actors 
shall be ready, does our reading of American 
history justify us in believing that it will be 
a storehouse for dramatic incident and move- 
ment? Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dra- 
matic Art and Literature^ remarks that the 
great requisite in the historical drama con- 
sists in this : " It must be a crowded extract 
and a living development of history," — by 
which I suppose him to mean that it shall 
present a series of tableaux, which shall dis- 
cover an actual growth and culmination of 
historic life. Now in the fullest and most 
familiar portion of our early history, that of 
New England, there are no tableaux, because 
there are no groups and no contrasts appeal- 
ing vividly to the eye. The contrast which 
we bear in mind is to the contemporary his- 
tory of England, or the subsequent history 
of America. There is scarcely even a con- 
trast of figures : the Indian makes the 
sketchiest possible personage, and the Qua- 
ker, at this distance, is only another shade 
of dun from the Puritan. Then there is no 
culmination of historic fact. The history 
has been called the march of a headless mob, 
but there is not even the picturesque vio- 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 123 

lence of a mob. We recognize the growth 
of ideas and the expansion of material pros- 
perity, neither of which admits of very ani- 
mated presentation ; and there were no crises 
which could furnish corresponding dramatic 
points, — scarcely any persons of marked 
prominence for centres of dramatic interest. 
Longfellow, with his unfailing perception 
of artistic values, seized upon the two tragic 
elements in early New England history, 
the persecution of the Quakers and the 
witchcraft delusion. These he significantly 
termed The New England Tragedies, and 
in arranging them he kept within historical 
bounds. If he did not expect them to be 
played, at least he took no advantage of 
the doubt to free himself from any restric- 
tion of the acted drama. Except that the 
scenes and acts are shorter than is common, 
nothing is lacking for a feasible representa- 
tion on the boards, — but, one instinctively 
adds, on the boards of an amateur theatre. 
The high lights required on the regular 
stage would disclose the meagreness of the 
two plays as spectacles, while the possible 
refinement and delicacy of impersonation in 
an amateur performance, and the equalizing 
of text and setting, would disclose the grace 



124 MEN AND LETTERS 

and gentle charm of the situations. But 
any representation would be likely to show 
the inadequacy of the themes taken as his- 
torical pictures. When we bring Puritans 
and Quakers together in the little town of 
Boston, and take for the turning-point of the 
drama merely the expulsion of the Quakers, 
there is not enough appeal to the imagina- 
tion to call out any very profound feeling. 
Moreover, there is no real culmination either 
in John Endicott or in Giles Corey of the 
Salem Farms ; we are simply given scenes 
out of a very provincial history, with only 
remote reference to universal passions. It 
must be borne in mind that the poet viewed 
the themes as a part of his trilogy, and was 
occupied with their humanitarian aspect. 

The persecution of the Quakers was sim- 
ply an exhibition of the Puritan character 
and training ; it sprang from nothing, it led 
to nothing ; and spectacularly there is in the 
contrast of Puritan and Quaker only two 
shades of the same color, since modern de- 
corum scarcely allows the Quaker to appear 
on the stage in his historic occasional dress. 
The witchcraft delusion does offer an oppor- 
tunity for some passionate and fiery scenes ; 
there is a chance for a lurid light against 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 125 

the sombre Puritan background, and for 
finely modeled figures in such persons as 
Sewall and Mather. A dramatic incident 
of value is to be found in the sudden revul- 
sion of feeling which followed the indict- 
ment of Madam Hale as a witch ; that and 
Judge Sewall's confession would make tell- 
ing points on the stage. 

A better subject than either of these is to 
be found in the legend which Hawthorne 
used in The Gray Champion. A drama 
founded on Goffe's adventures would give a 
series of historic scenes in two continents, 
beginning with the trial of a king, and clos- 
ing with an apparently miraculous interposi- 
tion. It would have the great advantage of 
dealing with great subjects, and of introduc- 
ing figures already familiar to the ordinary 
reader. 

There is another subject in New England 
provincial history which offers dramatic sit- 
uations, but it would perhaps be more cor- 
rect to call it a passage in Canadian history ; 
and it has the misfortune of all Canadian 
subjects, that it suggests a tragedy without 
a fifth act. In 1690, Sir William Phips, at 
the head of an expedition of twenty -two 
hundred men, — shipmasters, merchants, mas- 



126 MEN AND LETTERS 

ter meclianics, and substantial farmers, — 
sailed out of Boston harbor to attack and 
capture Quebec. Phips's own history is one 
of romantic interest, and this bluff, chol- 
eric, prompt, rude man stands opposed to 
the picturesque governor of Canada, Count 
Frontenac, one of that long list of adventu- 
rous men who light the canvas of Canadian 
history with brilliant points. Frontenac 
sought the aid of the Indian in the defense 
of Quebec, and a grand council of all the 
tribes of the lakes was held. At this coun- 
cil a curious scene occurred, which I give in 
Mr. Parkman's words : — 

" Frontenac [at this time a man of seven- 
ty] took a hatchet, brandished it in the air, 
and sang the war song. The principal 
Frenchmen present followed his example. 
The Christian Iroquois of the two neighbor- 
ing missions joined them, and so also did 
the Hurons and Algonquins of Lake Nipis- 
sing, stamping and screeching like a troop of 
madmen, while the governor led the dance, 
whooping like the rest. His predecessor 
would have perished rather than play such a 
part in such a company, but the punctilious 
old courtier was himself half an Indian at 
heart, — as much at home in a wigwam as 
in the halls of princes." 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 127 

The actual fighting before Quebec was 
insignificant. Phips waited for reinforce- 
ments, and kept up only a feeble cannon- 
ading. Meanwhile, he tried the effect of a 
summons to surrender, and his messenger, 
received blindfold into the town, was con- 
ducted by tortuous ways, and amid the jeers 
of the populace, to the chateau, where, when 
the bandage was removed, his eye dropped 
before the haughty presence of Frontenac, 
surrounded by French and Canadian officers, 
glittering with all the gay insignia of rank 
and office. The interview was short and 
contemptuous ; the New England general 
was bluffed by the Frenchman, and with- 
drew from the contest just as he was about 
to be aided by a powerful ally, — famine. 
As he sailed away, " Quebec," says Park- 
man, " was divided between thanksgiving 
and rejoicing. The captured flag of Phips's 
ship was borne to the cathedral in triumph ; 
the bishop sang Te Deum ; and amid the 
firing of cannon the image of the Virgin 
was carried to each church and chapel in the 
place by a procession in which priest, people, 
and troops all took part. The day closed 
with a great bonfire in honor of Frontenac." 

This historic event has the misfortune, as 



128 MEN AND LETTERS. 

I h?vve intimated, of having been a failure 
on Phips's part. It is necessary for us to be 
on Frontenac's side to see the possibility of 
a drama culminating in the triumph at the 
withdrawal of Phips's fleet ; and even then 
we see how different for dramatic purposes 
is a successful defense from a successful at- 
tack. What pleases me is the spectacular 
element in the grouping of Frenchmen, 
New Englanders, and Indians in Fronte- 
nac's breakdown and in the pageant. For 
one, I like a good show on the stage, and I 
commend this historic episode as offering a 
capital background for a bright love story. 

The career of Joseph Warren is not with- 
out dramatic hints. The Boston Massacre, 
Warren's oration at the Old South, with his 
suppression of the rumble of violence, and 
his fall at Bunker Hill give points for repre- 
sentation of successive hours in the conflict 
between Great Britain and America. For 
the point of time was not only critical ; it 
held the larger development of the war in 
miniature. And that is precisely what the 
drama attempts ; for the historical drama is 
a microcosm, an epitome of the great conflict, 
just as tragedy is an epitome of human life ; 
and when a single contest contains the germ 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 129 

of an epoch, tlie dramatist has only to give it 
artistic selection. In the secret councils of 
the Committee of Safety, the arrogance and 
timidity of Governor Gage and the court 
party, the national instincts of the conscien- 
tious loyalists, the restlessness of the popu- 
lace, tlie foresight and steadiness of a few 
patriots, we find the elements of true dra- 
matic representation ; and it only needs to 
arrange these in a culminating series of 
events to give in reduced scale the entire 
historic movement. 

Yet the Revolution, as we used to call it, 
is singularly lacking in dramatic properties. 
We are misled by the title ; the American 
Development would be a truer phrase, and 
it is observable that careful historical wri- 
ters almost uniformly speak of the War for 
Independence. The French Revolution was 
rightly so called ; it shook to the centre an 
old order of things. The American Revolu- 
tion set the seal to a foregone conclusion. 
It disturbed existing political relations, but 
not until new ones of a higher order were 
germinant. The very nature of the conflict 
interfered with strong dramatic situations, 
— situations, that is, which seem to hold 
soluble elements of national life for a mo- 



130 MEN AND LETTERS 

ment, and suffer tliem to become indestruc- 
tible before our eyes. There are romantic 
incidents, but tbe only group of events dur- 
ing the war which offers any opportunity for 
an historical drama is that relating to Ar- 
nold's treachery and Andre's execution. In 
those events there would be a chance to lift 
the figure of Washington into dramatic 
prominence. 

We often hear it said, Happy the nation 
that has no history ; but of course by that 
phrase is meant the nation that suffers no 
violence of war and devastation, for it is 
these things which, in the old conception of 
history, went to make up the account, — 
these and the quarrels of kings. In the 
more modern conception of history, which 
regards the movement of a nation toward 
the realization of freedom, there are many 
things besides war and quarrels which are 
reckoned ; but it must be admitted that the 
possibilities of dramatic representation lie 
in circumstances of sharp change, and in 
the action of the passions. This is merely 
making use of the very etymon of the 
drama, which is a thing done, and done 
before our eyes. In the history of our 
country, when we leave behind the period 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 131 

of war, and the adjustment of parts whicli 
make the nation, what remains for rep- 
resentation in the historic drama ? Plainly, 
not the progress of laws, nor the growth of 
cities, nor westward emigration, nor the find- 
ing of gold in California. The philosopher 
and economist and social novelist have the 
monopoly in such fields. Neither does the 
invention of the cotton-gin, the reaper, or the 
sewing-machine serve the purpose of the 
historical drama, though Mr. Whitman can 
cram them boldly into a lyric. They all 
help to make up our history, as do number- 
less other factors in civilization, but they are 
not dramatic in their nature. 

It needs no special insight to see that the 
one subject which lies at the heart of our 
history since the Revolution is the one sub- 
ject in which dramatic incidents are imbed- 
ded. Slavery and its extinction constitute 
the theme of our history since the Union 
was reached ; and because the extinction 
of slavery has made possible a nation no 
longer divided by irreconcilable differences, 
there is always in every drama based on the 
slavery contest, however tragic may be its 
incidents, the possibility of a triumphant 
conclusion, accordant with history and the 



132 MEN AND LETTERS 

prophecy of history. The conflict for free- 
dom is so large and so moving in its nature, 
and has always been so dramatic in its inci- 
dent ; its roots lie so deep in the moral nature, 
where alone the great drama thrives ; and it 
is so involved in national development, that 
all other subjects in our history are weak 
and insignificant before the possibilities of 
this theme. We stand, perhaps, too near 
the scenes of the late war, and are too much 
a part of the conflict, to be able to bear the 
spectacle of that drama reenacted on the 
stage ; but in due time the events not so 
much of the war as of the moral and polit- 
ical conflict will find adequate presentation, 
when the vast proportions of the theme will 
be reduced in epitome and made vivid in 
action, which concentrates the thought of 
the historic movement into a few characters 
and situations. 

There is a subject — I had almost said 
the only subject — magnificently conspicu- 
ous, and capable of holding the entire his- 
tory of American slavery and its downfall. 
The material for illustrating it is copious 
and well known ; in parts, indeed, almost 
ready for use. It is just one of the cases 
where history pauses for a moment, puts its 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 133 

finger on the page, and says There ! The 
immediate incidents and events, when com- 
pared with other scenes, look trivial ; yet 
how perfectly typical and dramatic are 
every one of the facts which we possess 
regarding the life and death of Captain 
John Brown ! Here is the moral indigna- 
tion of the people finding expression in one 
sharp explosion ; here is the prophet saying, 
"Let my people go." Victor Hugo's sketch 
of John Brown on the gallows, which looks 
in the darkness like a cross, presents in a 
theatrical and offensive way the intense feel- 
ing which found in Brown a sacrifice for a 
great sin. The figure looms, in the midst 
of its fellows, into gigantic proportions. 
Even for those who call his character an 
insane and fanatic one his adventures have 
a strange fascination, and the farther we get 
away from the scenes the more typical do 
they become. The very smallness of the 
scale upon which his attempt at Harper's 
Ferry was made renders the action all the 
more fitted for dramatic copying, and none 
the less prefigurative of the mighty contest 
at hand ; the failure of the attempt, more- 
over, holds a finer power than success. 

The quaint Puritanic speech of the man 



134 MEN AND LETTERS 

is singularly fitted to express tlie religious 
and historical opposition to slavery. No 
one can read the simple narrative of Brown's 
conduct after his capture without perceiving 
that history has furnished drama with the 
very words he used, and almost the very or- 
der of those words. The conversation which 
took place mainly between Mason, the au- 
thor of the fugitive slave law, and Vallan- 
digham on one side and John Brown on the 
other is curiously dramatic in its character 
and force. The letters of Brown and his 
reported conversations are crowded with 
characteristic, spontaneous expressions, so 
that it would be entirely possible to present 
the man in his own terms, and to find in 
these truly poetical and fit language. Then 
the incidents connected with his execution 
are precisely of the kind to touch us with 
their representative character : the taking 
up of a negro child and caressing it ; the cry 
of the old black woman, " God bless you, 
old man ! I wish I could help you, but I 
cannot ; " and it is a matter of tradition that 
among the Virginia militia who surrounded 
the gallows, aiid marched and counter- 
marched, was Wilkes Booth. 

These and other trivial incidents help to 



AMERICAN HISTORY ON THE STAGE 135 

sliow how rich in subsidiary action is the 
entire dramatic scene. The great vakie of 
it lies in its microcosmic presentation of the 
mighty conflict so soon to shake the land. 
The representatives of the slave power in 
hotspur Governor Wise and the cold and 
crafty Mason stood confronting Brown ; the 
Northern apologist for slavery was there ; 
and if it were necessary to confine the action 
to Harper's Ferry, it would be quite possible 
to bring upon the stage spokesmen for all 
the leading parties in the country without 
violating the facts of history. 

A great drama is not to be had for the 
ordering, any more than a great work of art 
of any kind, but the chances for it are in- 
creased by the gradual recovery of the stage 
to wider relations. The hope of good drama 
does not lie in the repetition of old plays ; it 
is not a dead power ; its life is in the pres- 
ent, and there can be no real vitality in the 
drama in any country unless it takes root in 
the soil. The drama is still a foreign thing 
with us, — foreign from our traditional 
tastes, and foreign in its appointments. To 
my thinking the chance for greater things 
lies through historic scenes rather than 
through social contrasts. It is significant 



136 MEN AND LETTERS 

that Tennyson, an Englishman through and 
through, expressed his political feeling in 
Queen Mary. It was not a success, because 
people are not yet accustomed to go to the 
theatre as they read the newspaper, and 
Tennyson shares in the disadvantage of tak- 
ing up the drama as something foreign from 
English literary culture. His assumption 
of archaic forms of speech was an indication 
of his effort to bring his play into relation 
with the older English theatre ; it suffered 
from its excess of antiquarianism. But 
Tennyson's failure points toward a change, 
and it is not impossible that in America, 
where prejudice sits more lightly on its 
throne, we may witness an increased con- 
sciousness of national being through the 
presentation of history in dramatic form, as 
well as through other forms of literary art, 
which have hitherto been more familiar to 
us. There has been gathering a delightful 
moss of legend and romance to cover the 
stony facts of our history. It may well be 
that the reader of Hawthorne and Irving 
and Whittier will yet have the pleasure of 
seeing the historic life of America epitom- 
ized on the stage in dramatic action. 



THE SHAPING OF EXCELSIOR. 

When Hawthorne went through a vir- 
tuoso's collection he came upon Cornelius 
Agrlppa's book of magic, in which were 
pressed many flowers ; among these was 
Longfellow's A Sprig of Fennel. " It is as 
good, perhaps, as ExcelsioT^'' writes Longfel- 
low to Samuel Ward ; " Hawthorne, who is 
passing the night with me, likes it better." 
The title Fennel was changed, for the worse 
I think, to The Goblet of Life. That could 
not have been pressed in a book, to be sure, 
through the virtuoso might easily have had 
the goblet in some corner cupboard. But a 
visit to Harvard College Library gives one 
the opportunity to see a greater curiosity, — 
a bit of Longfellow's mind. Spread open 
in one of the cases are the first and second 
drafts of Excelsior^ and a rare chance is 
given of seeing how a poet, when he has 
seized upon the central thought of a poem, 
will sometimes work industriously at its final 
form. 



138 MEN AND LETTERS 

The first draft was written upon tlie blank 
spaces of a letter received by the poet from 
Charles Sumner, so that the very paper of 
the poem had already an historic interest. 
If it were worth while one might stop a mo- 
ment to note the appositeness of the mate- 
rial, since Sumner had in him very much of 
the spirit of the aspiring young man, when 
he wrote his note to Longfellow, and was 
just the person to have carried the banner if 
he had happened to think of that mode of 
expression. The first stanza, with its era- 
sures, is as follows : — 

The shades of night were f aUing- fast 

When through an Alpine village pass'd 
EWigh- snow and ice 
bore 
'mid 
A youth who 

A banner with the strange device 

' Roapondod in an un kao wn t o ngu o^ 

Excelsior ! 

The poet's first attempt was at a con- 
trasted image of the peasant's humble life 
with its contentment, and the aspiration of 
the youth unintelligible to the peasant in 
the valley. It was too soon to introduce this 



THE SHAPING OF EXCELSIOR 139 

contrast ; lie resolved to show the youth 
only, not speaking, but silently displaying 
his symbol, precious however to himself. 
Then the preciousness appeared commonplace 
or necessarily involved in the very action of 
the youth, and the poet returned to the idea 
of a contrast, but this time a contrast of cold, 
mdifferent nature and passionate, spiritual 
man. What an immense advance in full- 
ness of expression ! It is curious, however, 
that in the second draft, on another paper, 
also preserved, the poet returned to this idea 
and tried again, — 

A youth who bore a pearl of price, ■ — 

possibly seeking to connect the image with 
the Biblical one in order to suggest the in- 
terpretation of his parable by linking it 
with an accepted image of spiritual con- 
tempt of the world. There is a slight verbal 
correction also in "'mid for throug\ as if the 
physical difficulty of through ice annoyed 
him. The second stanza in the first draft 
reads : — 

his eye beneath 
His brow was sad ; -but tmde sa&a^ 

Flash' d like a faulcliioii from its sheath 



140 MEN AND LETTERS 

rung' 
And like a silver clarion -sasg;, 
The accents of that 
? Tia flwnofc voioo in an unknown tongue, 

Excelsior ! 

Here he was dissatisfied as soon as lie had 
half completed the third line, for he had fin- 
ished the idea and had half a line to spare. 
He went back, struck out hut underneath, 
wrote his eye beneath, which instantly gave 
him the compactness he wished and a 
straightforwardness of construction also. 
Then, probably, when he had said that his 
sweet voice sung like a silver clarion, he re- 
flected that a clarion rung rather than sung, 
and changing this word, he saw that in the 
accents of the tongue he had a more ringing 
power than he had in a sweet voice, and cer- 
tainly not only is the measure of the last 
line now better, but there has been a great 
access of virility ; the mere change of sung 
to rung has lifted the third line into some- 
thing like a trumpet-note. 

In the third stanza, the first draft showed 
only two slight alterations ; in the first line 
he wrote humble homes, which he changed 
to happy homes, thus presenting a stronger 
contrast to the youth's loneliness, and in 



THE SHAPING OF EXCELSIOR 141 

the second lie changed pure and hright to 
clear and hrigJit^ but the whole stanza was 
unsatisfactory as it then stood ; 

In happy homes he saw the light 
Of household fires gleam clear and hright, 
And far o'erhead the glaciers shone, 
His lips breath' d with a stifled groan, 
Excelsior ! 

The labor appears in the second draft, 
where the first two lines are the same, but 
the second two are thus worked over ; — 

Above the spectral 
Aa d far above - the glaciers shone ; 
And from his lips escaped a 
PiP ^ - lipa TinpTx^H ftln ^ t . lio p iaing ^ groan. 

Not only is the rhythm better in this last 
line, but the action is far more poetic, while 
both lines have gained in nervous force and 
in their connection with each other. As 
first written, there was an awkward halt at 
the close of the third line. In the final re- 
vision one other change was introduced by 
making the fires gleam ^oarm and hright 
instead of clear and bright^ which was a 
weak redundancy, while warm also inten- 
sifies the contrast. 



142 MEN AND LETTERS 

The fourtli stanza came easily. The first 
three lines were unchanged in the first draft 
or the second, and stood as they do in the 
printed form. The fourth line in the first 
draft appeared 

his clarion 
And clear that youthful voice replied ; 

in the second draft, it was 

loud 
And oloQJ his clarion voice replied ; 

in the poem it now reads 

And loud that clarion voice replied. 

Slight changes these, but in the direction of 
euphony and picturesqueness. It may be 
said that youthful in its contrast to the 
old man was preferable, but it was not so 
euphonic, and clarion^ though used before, 
was probably taken as suggesting, with loud- 
ness, the spiritual cry of the young man 
heard above the physical voice of the tem- 
pest and torrent. 

There is some uncertainty in deciphering 
the erasures of the fifth stanza. In the cor- 
rections, however, there is no singular varia- 
tion of form except that in the third line, 
pale hlue eye became altered to bright blue 
eye ; possibly the poet at first meant to indi- 



THE SHAPING OF EXCELSIOR 143 

cate his weariness hj pale^ and then resolved 
to give rather his resolution in bright. 

In the sixth stanza the pine tree's with- 
ered branch is an improvement upon the 
first form, which appeared in both drafts, 
the withered j9i?2e tree^s branch and awfid 
avalanche was first the tsLuiev falling ava- 
lanche. 

The seventh stanza was wholly rewritten, 
and recast. Besides the linear erasures, 
lines are drawn downward, marking out the 
whole, and a new stanza takes its place. 

And as the 

^ Sio piou a- monks of Saint Bernard 

In haste the convent gate unlbarr'd 

They 

And heard amid the falling snow 

More faint that smothered voice of woe, 

Excelsior ! 

This was clearly abrupt in transition and 
false also to the thought of the poem, for it 
was no part of the poet's intention to char- 
acterize the cry as a smothered voice of woe ; 
so he rewrote it as it now stands, except that 
in the second draft he wrote startled air for 
frosty and clear, cold successively, a change 
which added a new and striking effect. The 



144 MEN AND LETTERS 

immense improvement in the new stanza is 
apparent at a glance, since in the turn of 
the poem the very action of the monks is 
subtly connected with the aspiration of the 
youth. 

The first two lines of the last stanza but 
one gave the poet some trouble before he 
could find the most fit expression. In the 
first draft he wrote without erasure : — 

And guided by the faithful hound, 

A frozen, lifeless corse they found ', 

Still grasping in his hand of ice 

The banner with the strange device, 

Excelsior ! 
In the second draft the first two lines appear : 

A traveller, by 

Bupiod in -saew the faithful hound 
Half buried in the snow was 
Far up tho poo a a tra veHep found 

The form in the first draft was probably 
chosen before the original seventh stanza 
was discarded. Certainly the omission of 
the pious monks in the final discovery is a 
gain ; the loneliness of the youth is inten- 
sified when he is discovered not by one of 
his own race, but by a hound. Once more, 



THE SHAPING OF EXCELSIOR 145 

as in the beginning, there is, as it were, a 
resolution into nature, and the youth, the 
snow and ice, and a dumb creature remain. 

The first two lines of the last stanza stand 
in print as they were first written, but the 
last two lines show the poet's fatigue at the 
close of his work. He had his idea per- 
fected, but his mind stumbled over the right 
words. Thus the first draft is as follows ; — 

xxfi€c 

■ Hia lip3 b fiid- oaagM the oIoqj of doiy - 

serene 
And from the tlee^ sky, faint and far 

fell 
A voice dropp e d like a falling- star, 

Excelsior! 

He did not know it then, but he had really 
finished his poem, for when he came later to 
write his second draft, he made his cor- 
rection over again : — 

serene 
And from the doop sky, faint and far 

At the bottom of the first draft are the 
words, " September 28, 1841. Half - past 
three o'clock, morning. Now to bed." He 
wrote first September 27, and then remem- 
bered that he had reached the next day and 
changed the T to 8. If any one is curious to 



146 MEN AND LETTERS 

know the day of the week, it was Monday 
night that the poet sat up to write this poem. 
Sumner's letter to him is dated merely 
Thursday, so one can imagine that he had 
answered it and now had it lying by him as 
waste paper. 

The study of the growth of a poem is an 
interesting and curious business, yet after 
all how little one really sees of the poet at 
work. Somehow or other, as Lowell says 
regarding Hawthorne, apropos of his note- 
books, you look through the key-hole and 
think you will catch the secret of the alche- 
mist, but at the critical moment his back is 
turned toward you. It is rare, however, 
that one has so good an opportunity as this 
of seeing the shaping of a poetic idea. 



EMERSON'S SELF. 

Fifty years and more have passed since 
the publication of Nature. Before the ap- 
pearance of that little book, and for more 
than forty years after, Emerson's voice was 
heard in pulpit or on platform, with great 
frequency for a v/hole generation, and then 
intermittently, uttering those comments on 
things, men, and ideas which may be found 
under various arrangements in the eleven 
volumes of his collected writings. Daring 
this period, and with increasing attention, 
his thought has been made the subject of 
endless discussion, and has entered into the 
habit of other men's thought. It has stim- 
ulated, corrected, quickened, yet it has de- 
fied analysis, and it is vain to say that it 
has found, at the hands of any expositor, so 
clear a sjmthetic summary as to satisfy his 
readers. 

In truth, there has been a general dispo- 
sition to take Emerson as a large fact, and 
to require that he shall be treated in a large 



148 MEN AND LETTERS 

way. A jaunty reviewer once proposed to 
crusli Wordsworth. " Crush Wordsworth ! " 
said Southey, with indignant scorn. "He 
might as well try to crush Skidd aw ! " And 
however one may cavil at Emerson, one can- 
not escape the conviction that the phenom- 
enon of the New Englander is not to be 
dismissed with an epigram. Time enough 
has elapsed since he first came into view to 
leave it quite certain that it is no longer a 
question of degree of comparison with other 
men, but of such tests as are applied to 
unique men. 

There is one mode of examination com- 
monly used with writers which fails in the 
case of Emerson. It has long been known 
that the dates of publication of his works 
offer slight criterion for dates of composi- 
tion ; indeed, that very few of his essays or 
addresses have any such integrity as may be 
implied in a preparation extending over so 
much time as their length would require ; 
on the contrary, that they are all, or nearly 
all, piecemeal productions, and a sentence in 
one of late date may have been transferred 
from a note - book of the earliest period. 
Even with all the aid given by his biog- 
rapher, it is impossible to make a chrono- 



EMERSON'S SELF 149 

logical study of Emerson's writings witli any 
hope of reaching very definite conclusions 
regarding the growth of his opinions. One 
easily comes to think that there was little of 
development, as we commonly understand 
the phrase, — little, that is, of logical pro- 
cess by which a germinal thought comes to 
maturity, and takes on a form very different 
from its earliest expression ; but this does 
not forbid that lateral expansion by which 
certain large ideas, received with reference 
to some one department of thought or ac- 
tion, spread so as to comprehend wide areas 
of life. This is the gift of experience, and 
the man of genius as well as the logician 
may benefit by it. 

Before the appearance of Mr. Cabot's 
Memoir^ the student was compelled to take 
the body of Emerson's writings and treat it 
as an impersonal subject, getting only such 
oblique light as falls from a character more 
than commonly dissociated from activity. 
The Emerson whom all but his intimates 
knew was a calm figure, living in the rustic 
privacy of a New England village ; appear- 
ing as a speaker to such audiences as would 
gather to hear him ; occasionally mingling 
on the platform with men and women of 



150 MEN AND LETTERS 

some special organization, but himself iden- 
tified with no sect or party ; touching many 
movements in politics and religion, but not 
at the centre of any of them ; separate, not 
from want of sympathy, but through the 
necessity of his nature. As the hands in the 
fairy tale ministered to the wants of the 
prince, though he saw no person, so the voice 
of Emerson was always stealing out of the 
mist which seemed to envelop him. 

It is a matter for congratulation, that the 
task of preparing the biography which was 
to bring Emerson more distinctly into the 
light, and reveal him even, I suspect, to 
some who thought they already knew him 
well, should have fallen to one who could be 
intimate with Emerson's thought, and yet, in 
his own mental habit, had a strong bent 
toward systematizing. Mr. Cabot does not 
assume the function of an interpreter who 
conceives it his business to construct a con- 
sistent Emerson, although he uses the topi- 
cal method somewhat in treating of certain 
marked phases of Emerson's thought and 
life, such as transcendentalism and religion ; 
but he shows himself to have that true his- 
torical method which marshals facts so that 
they carry their own inevitable conclusions. 



EMEBSON'S SELF 151 

This is as valuable in biography as in his- 
tory ; and while the manner of much con- 
temporary biographic work is in the efface- 
ment of the biographer, the present subject 
is plainly one which calls for something more 
than a collection of letters and diaries. It 
demands a clear insight, a power to follow 
clues, and in general a capacity to bring a 
natural order out of what to many would 
have been a chaotic mass of material. 

In this respect Mr. Cabot's Memoir is 
especially serviceable for supplying that one 
guide to a study of Emerson's works which 
was most needed : the disclosure, namely, 
of Emerson's conscious relation to his own 
thought. Mr. Cabot appears to have per- 
ceived the need, and to have lost no op- 
portunity for adding to the image, which 
now stands in far clearer light than before, 
— the image of Emerson as he was to him- 
self. Only as that is well apprehended 
may the student hope to solve some of the 
problems of Emerson's personality in its 
relation to the men and institutions of his 
time. 

There is no break to be detected in the 
continuity of Emerson's life, scarcely any of 
those vacillations of purpose, those sudden 



152 MEN AND LETTERS 

wayward impulses, which are like the change 
of voice when a boy becomes a man. The 
idealist was always there, and the genuine- 
ness of a style which was peculiarly his 
becomes more apparent as one detects its 
notes in his early letters. If he drew after 
any pattern, it was that of his aunt, Mary 
Moody Emerson, who seems to have entered 
into his life more emphatically than any 
one. Mr. Cabot points out one of the char- 
acteristics of her influence in forcing a cer- 
tain concentration of intellectual life ; and 
in speaking of it, he hints that all the Em- 
erson boys suffered somewhat from the strain 
laid upon them. " In Ralph's case the draw- 
back came in another shape. Want of ' that 
part of education which is conducted in the 
nursery and the playground, in fights and 
frolics, in business and politics,' — leaving 
him without the help of the free-masonries 
which these things establish, — no doubt ex- 
aggerated the idealist's tendency to fence 
himself off from contact with men, and 
made it an effort for him, in after-life, to 
meet them on common terms in every-day 
intercourse." Yet this was but a miniature 
of his whole life. Once and again in his 
writings, as instanced by the brief quotation 



EMERSON'S SELF 153 

just given, Emerson looks wistfully toward 
the solid ground on which he sees his fellow- 
men walking, while he himself, by some 
fatality of his nature, must needs move 
above the surface. " The man of his aspi- 
rations," as Mr. Cabot well says, " was not 
the moralist, sitting aloof on the heights of 
philosophy, and overlooking the affairs of 
men from a distance, but the man of the 
world, in the true sense of the phrase ; the 
man of both worlds, the public soul, with all 
his doors open, with equal facility of recep- 
tion and of communication." This, as I 
said, is suggested by his writings, but it is 
even more clearly brought out in his corre- 
spondence. 

To his aunt Emerson wrote, always sure 
of a recipient of his thought, and some 
measure of her influence over him may be 
taken by the freedom and fullness with 
which he tried his speculations on her. 
Hence, also, his letters to her are especially 
valuable as marking the high tide of his 
mind, and disclosing movements more impor- 
tant for making up an estimate of his nature 
than he was probably aware. Thus there is 
a fine letter to Miss Emerson, written when 
he was loitering in Alexandria, on a return 



154 MEN AND LETTERS 

from a health -seeking trip in the South. 
Emerson was twenty-four years old at the 
time, had just apparently found his place as 
a preacher, and was looked upon with grow- 
ing interest in this capacity. " It occurs to 
me lately," he writes, " that we have a great 
many capacities which we lack time and 
occasion to improve. If I read the Bride 
of Lammermoor^ a thousand imperfect sug- 
gestions arise in my mind, to which if I 
could give heed, I should be a novelist. 
When I chance to light upon a verse of 
genuine poetry, — it may be in a corner of 
a newspaper, — a forcible sympathy awakens 
a legion of little goblins in the recesses of 
the soul, and if I had leisure to attend to the 
line, tiny rabble I should straightway be a 
poet. In my day-dreams I do often hunger 
and thirst to be a painter ; besides all the 
spasmodic attachments I indulge to each of 
the sciences and each province of letters. 
They all in turn play the coquette with my 
imagination, and it may be I shall die at the 
last a forlorn bachelor, jilted of them all. 
But all that makes these reveries noticeable 
is the indirect testimony they seem to bear 
to the most desirable attributes of human 
nature. If it has so many conatus (seekings 



EMERSON'S SELF 155 

after), as the philosophic term is, they are 
not in vain, but point to a duration ample 
enough for the entire satisfaction of them 
all." 

Here the conclusion interests us less than 
the hint which the whole passage gives of 
Emerson's appropriation of the world, of 
his growing sense of power and his expan- 
sion of nature. It was not an argument for 
immortality which he was constructing ; it 
was an attestation of his own indestructible 
personality. He was aware of the move- 
ment of his wings ; he felt them beat the 
air ; physically he was weak, but he was 
already testing his spiritual body, and dis- 
covering v/hat reaches of vision and flight 
were possible to it. The very experience of 
a first journey from home, and especially of 
that return which always quickens the pulse 
of a live man, reinforced this interior excur- 
sion, and produced an exhilaration which 
may have been momentary in its extreme 
exaltation, but clearly marks an epoch in 
Emerson's spiritual life. Listen to the con- 
fidence which he commits to his diary at the 
same time : — 

" June, 1827. Although I strive to keep 
my soul in a polite equilibrium, I belong to 



156 MEN AND LETTERS 

the good sect of tlie Seekers, and conceive 
that the dissokition of the body will have a 
wonderful effect on the opinions of all creed- 
mongers. How the flimsy sophistries that 
have covered nations — unclean cobwebs 
that have reached their long dangling threads 
over whole ages, issuing from the dark bow- 
els of Athanasius and Calvin — will shrink 
to nothing at that sun-burst of truth ! And 
nobody will be more glad than Athanasius 
and Calvin. In my frigidest moments, 
when I put behind me the subtler evidences, 
and set Christianity in the light of a piece 
of human history, — much as Confucius or 
Solyman might regard it, — I believe my- 
self immortal. The beam of the balance 
trembles, to be sure, but settles always on 
the right side. For otherwise all things 
look so silly. The sun is silly, and the con- 
nection of beings and worlds such mad non- 
sense. I say this, I say that in pure reason 
I believe my immortality, because I have 
read and heard often that the doctrine hangs 
wholly on Christianity. This, to be sure, 
brings safety, but I think I get bare life 
without." 

The whole period bounded in his life by 
his entrance upon the ministry and his resig- 



E ME B SON'S SELF 157 

nation of his charge is interesting for the 
hints which it gives of the working of his 
mind. Those eight years were the making 
of Emerson. Then he seems to have found 
his latitude and longitude, and his after- 
life was in the main the expansion of the 
thoughts then entertained. It is a pity 
that his poems are not dated. They could 
scarcely have been so desultory in composi- 
tion as the essays ; and even if they were 
subjected to revision and verbal changes, the 
thought in each could hardly have been 
altered. I am greatly mistaken if they 
would not throw interesting light on the 
recondite subject of Emerson's growth in 
consciousness. 

Emerson's desire to preach continued for 
some time after it had been demonstrated 
that there was no place for him in the insti- 
tutional ministry. He seems to have made 
several efforts to adjust himself to his fel- 
lows through this form of association, and at 
last to have retired, baffled. In the condi- 
tion of affairs in New England at the time, 
the ministry seemed to be the only possible 
profession for such a nature as Emerson's, 
and in working into it and working out of it 
Emerson may be said to have been following 



158 MEN AND LETTERS 

an experimental course, hardly conscious of 
its full significance. He was finding him- 
self by the process of elimination, and it is 
an interesting commentary on New England 
life, as well as upon E-merson's personality, 
that this long and somewhat costly experi- 
ment should have been deemed necessary. 

The ministry was then, as it always had 
been in New England, the one recourse for 
the idealist. Literature there was none, and 
there was no literary vocation. In the 
intellectual growth of this province, so in- 
tense in its activity, and so comparatively 
independent of growth elsewhere, there had 
been a slow differentiation of functions 
going on. Not long before Emerson's time 
the minister had released the politician and 
the lawyer, and these were now separate per- 
sons. In Emerson's time itself a further 
separation took place, and the man of letters 
stood distinct. Emerson was an agent in 
this development, and as a consequence the 
choice in many minds between the ministry 
as a profession and the profession of letters 
is made earlier in life, and without that long 
experimental process which took place in 
Emerson's case. 

The very provincialism of the New Eng- 



EMERSOWS SELF 159 

land mind, while it enlarged the scope of 
the ministerial office, and caused that it 
finally was capable of dividing itself into 
several distinct offices of the higher life, 
missed the one fundamental, ineradicable 
notion of the ministry as disclosed in his- 
toric Christianity. It is interesting to note, 
therefore, that the rock of stumbling, which 
put an end to Emerson's ecclesiastical career, 
was his inability to bring his congregation to 
take the one little step, which seemed so 
short, of giving up the sacrament of the 
eucharist. Refined as that sacrament had 
become in the conception of the people, it 
still held them sufficiently to forbid their 
treating it as unessential. To Emerson, 
who was an individual, and very lightly 
bound even by the association of his order, 
the step was not only easy, it was necessary. 
Individuals can always do what commu- 
nities cannot, and Emerson, in breaking the 
last bond which connected him with institu- 
tional Christianity, was following his des- 
tiny, as the society which could not break 
this bond was half blindly obedient to a law 
which each member of the society, if iso- 
lated by thought as Emerson was, might 
have also disregarded, Emerson, in eman- 



160 MEN AND LETTERS 

cipating himself from the ministry, was 
freed from a profession ; and since the min- 
istry had come to be regarded simply as a 
profession, which one might choose as he 
chose the law or medicine, he was fulfilling 
the behest of that voice within him whose 
whispers we have already noticed. To him, 
as to most of his associates, the ministry 
was no longer regarded as an order. All 
the while that he was under the cloak of this 
profession he was more or less consciously 
struggling to escape, and one detects in his 
observations on preaching the rapidly increas- 
ing self-knowledge which was soon to make 
it impossible for him to remain in the pulpit. 
Thus he notes in his diarj^^ at the outset : — 
" Sunday^ April 24, 1824. I am begin- 
ning my professional studies. In a month 
I shall be legally a man ; and I deliber- 
ately dedicate my time, my talents, and my 
hopes to the church. ... I cannot dissem- 
ble that my abilities are below my ambi- 
tion ; and I find that I judged by a false 
criterion when I measured my powers by 
my ability to understand and criticise the 
intellectual character of another. I have, or 
had, a strong imagination, and consequently 
a keen relish for the beauties of poetry. 



EMERSON'S SELF 161 

My reasoning faculty is proportionably weak ; 
nor can I ever hope to write a Butler's 
Analogy, or an Essay of Hume. Nor is it 
strange that with this confession I should 
choose theology ; for the highest species of 
reasoning upon divine subjects is rather the 
fruit of a sort of moral imagination than of 
the reasoning machines, such as Locke, and 
Clarke, and David Hume." 

Here is a fumbling about, with his hand 
near, but not on, the handle of his being. 
Mark, now, how three years later, in a 
letter to his aunt, he has got upon the track 
of himself : " I preach half of every Sunday. 
When I attended church on the other half 
of a Sunday, and the image in the pulpit 
was all of clay, and not of tunable metal, I 
said to myself that if men would avoid that 
general language and general manner in 
which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, 
and would say only what was uppermost in 
their own minds, after their own individual 
manner, every man would be interesting. 
Every man is a new creation, can do some- 
thing best, has some intellectual modes and 
forms, or a character the general result of 
all, such as no other agent in the universe 
has : if he would exhibit that, it must needs 



162 MEN AND LETTERS. 

be engaging, must be a curious study to 
every inquisitive mind. But whatever prop- 
erties a man of narrow intellect feels to be 
peculiar he studiously hides ; he is ashamed 
or afraid of himself, and all his communica- 
tions to men are unskillful plagiarisms from 
the common stock of thought and knowl- 
edge, and he is of course flat and tiresome." 
Finally, an entry in his journal at the be- 
ginning of the year in which he resigned his 
charge marks the last stage in his evolution 
as he is about to emerge from the chrysalis 
of the New England ministry : ''''January 10, 
1832. It is the best part of the man, I some- 
times think, that revolts most against his 
being a minister. His good revolts from offi- 
cial goodness. If he never spoke or acted but 
with the full consent of his understanding, 
if the whole man acted always, how power- 
ful would be every act and every word ! 
Well, then, or ill, then, how much power he 
sacrifices by conforming himself to say or do 
in other folks' time, instead of in his own ! 
The difficulty is that we do not make a 
world of our own, but fall into institutions 
already made, and have to accommodate 
ourselves to them to be useful at all; and 
this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so 



EMERSON'S SELF 163 

much integrity, and of course of so much 
power. But how shall the droning world 
get on if all its beaux esprits recalcitrate 
upon its approved forms and accepted insti- 
tutions, and quit them all in order to be 
single-minded? The double-refiners would 
produce at the other end the double-damned." 
This last sentence is a felicitous expres- 
sion of an eddy in his mental current, but 
he goes straight at the practical question 
which his whole nature was asking when, a 
few days later, he writes with great force 
and with profound intelligence of his own 
spiritual quandary : " Every man hath his 
use, no doubt, and every one makes ever the 
effort, according to the energy of his own 
character, to suit his external condition to 
his inward constitution. If his external 
condition does not admit of such accomoda- 
tion, he breaks the form of his life, and 
enters a new one which does. If it will 
admit of such accommodation, he gradually 
bends it to his mind. Thus Finney can 
preach, and so his prayers are short. Park- 
man can pray, and so his prayers are long. 
Lowell can visit, and so his church service is 
less. But what shall poor I do, who can 
neither visit, nor pray, nor preach, to my 
mind ? " 



164 MEN AND LETTERS 

Emerson broke the form of his life, and 
had to make a new one out of such stuff as 
his opportunities afforded. He lectured and 
he wrote, but in truth it mattered little just 
what form his occupation took. He had not 
left one profession to enter another ; he had 
cleared himself of professional life altogether, 
and, having been true to the higher law of his 
being, he had that reasonable content there- 
after which comes to one who has attained 
full power of consciousness. Emerson never 
came nearer to telling the whole truth about 
himself than when he wrote to his betrothed 
on the eve of their marriage, when discus- 
sing the comparative merits of Concord and 
Plymouth as places of residence : "I am 
born a poet, — of a low class without doubt, 
yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. 
My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is 
for the most part in prose. Still I am a 
poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear 
lover of the harmonies that are in the soul 
and in matter, and specially of the corre- 
spondence between these and those. A sun- 
set, a forest, a snow-storm, a certain river- 
view, are more to me than many friends, and 
do ordinarily divide my day with my books. 
Wherever I go, therefore, I guard and study 



EMERSON'S SELF 165 

my rambling propensities." And again, in 
speaking of the efforts of Greeley and Bris- 
bane to attach him to their Fourierite asso- 
ciation : " One must submit, yet I foresaw, in 
the moment when I encountered these two 
new friends here, that I cannot content 
them. They are bent on popular actions. 
I am, in all my theory, ethics, and politics, 
a poet, and of no more use in their New 
York than a rainbow or a firefly. Mean- 
time, they fastened me in their thoughts to 
transcendentalism, whereof you know I am 
wholly guiltless, and which is s|)oken of as a 
known and fixed element, like salt or meal. 
So that I have to begin by endless disclaim- 
ers and explanations : ' I am not the man 
you take me for.' " 

It is delightful to find in the Mermoir^ after 
the determination of vocation, repeated illus- 
trations of Emerson's knowledge of himself, 
— that clear consciousness which he attained, 
not without effort, as we have seen, but also 
not with the violent throes of a man hardly 
born. The circumstances under which he 
came forward constituted the shell which he 
had to break, as I have tried to show, but 
his genius was always immanent, and pro- 
phetic from the start. Rarely, I think, has 



166 MEN AND LETTERS 

biography made so signal an addition to onr 
power of knowing a man who had already 
made himself familiar through words. By 
Mr. Cabot's aid, it is as if a person with 
whom we had been talking for hours, who 
had endeared himself to us by the beauty 
and richness of his words and the nameless 
grace of his presence, should then unfold to 
us the process of his own spiritual being ; 
not that which made him common with men, 
but that which gave him distinction, individ- 
uality. A revelation is afforded of the man 
himself in his self-discovery, in his expan- 
sion of nature, his growth of consciousness, 
in the very heart and secret of his genius. 

An interesting comparison might be 
drawn, after the manner of Plutarch, be- 
tween Emerson and John Adams. As 
Adams was the incarnation of the political 
New England, so Emerson was the finest 
product of that free - thinking New Eng- 
land which found no object outside the range 
of its speculation. The two were critical 
men. Adams came to the front in the crisis 
of political independence ; Emerson in the 
crisis of religious independence. Theodore 
Parker was the wind which stormed against 
the conventionally religious man, and only 



EMERSON'S SELF 167 

made Mm draw his cloak closer about bim ; 
while Emerson, shining and smiling, made 
him loosen his robes and bare himself to the 
open air. With what a striking contrast of 
mood the two historic Americans passed out 
of ken ! Adams, stormy even in his remi- 
niscence of life from the quiet harbor of old 
age ; Emerson, unperturbed when receiving 
the angry criticism of his day, subsiding 
into a long reverie of peace ! 

The visit of Emerson to England was the 
return of New England to the mother coun- 
try in a more emphatic sort than was Haw- 
thorne's. Never does England seem farther 
away from America than when one is read- 
ing English Traits, Below the surface of 
shrewd observation one may catch sight of 
the Spirit of England driven across the At- 
lantic two hundred years before, given new 
environment, set upon the same questions 
and bidden ask them in the open air, and 
getting its answer in such wise as to make 
everything strange when revisiting its old 
haunts. The individuality of Emerson, test- 
ing and trying England, is sharp enough, if 
one looks only for that, but it is easy also 
to resolve it into a speakership for a new 
people. 



168 MEN AND LETTERS 

It is, however, in the attitude of Emerson 
toward his own countrymen that his person- 
ality is most interesting. With all his writ- 
ten and spoken words concerning America, 
— and it is impossible to read his May Day 
without perceiving how great a relief to him 
was the return of peace after the separating 
war, — one fails to find the evidence of any 
passionate devotion to his country. The 
service which John Adams rendered in his 
loyalty to the nation, which he saw less by 
imagination than by an heroic, steady reali- 
zation of the facts of human life about him, 
was such a service as racked the giver. 
Emerson, in speaking of the volume of Let- 
ters and Social Aims which Schmidt in- 
troduced to the German public, used the 
expression " village thoughts." A piece of 
slightly conscious humility must not be taken 
too gravely, yet the estimate really does par- 
tially set off Emerson's defect on this side. 
He was at home in Concord. Anywhere 
else he was a stranger. Even Boston was a 
place to visit, though he gave that city an 
affection which is embodied in some noble 
verses. The glimpses which we get of the 
poet on his travels in his own country serve 
to deepen the impression which we form of 



EMERSON'S SELF 169 

the purely spectacular shape of the country 
in his vision. He was not indifferent to the 
struggles going on, and yet they were rather 
disturbances to his spirit than signs of a 
life which quickened his own pulse. 

To some minds this may seem to lift Em- 
erson above other men. In my judgment 
it separates him from them to his own loss. 
It is precisely this passion of nationality 
which differentiates seers and poets. Mil- 
ton had it. Carlyle had it. Tennyson has 
it. Victor Hugo had it. Goethe did not 
have it. The absence of this passion is in- 
deed the sign of an inferior ethical appre- 
hension. At any rate, the passion for coun- 
try is never far removed from the passion of 
righteousness. The cry over Jerusalem was 
the last echo of those prophetic voices which 
make Israel and Israel's God to be joined 
by closer than human ties. When one col- 
lects his God from ethnic fragments he is 
very apt at the same time to distribute his 
country. 

When all is said, there remains that 
about Emerson which cannot be defined or 
analyzed, — that bouquet of personality 
which lingers in one's recollection of him, 
whether one has acquired a knowledge of him 



170 MEN AND LET TEES 

by personal contact or through his books 
and letters. Dr. Holmes says finely that 
there was " a sweet seriousness in Emerson's 
voice that was infinitely soothing." "I re- 
member," he adds, " that in the dreadful 
war-time, on one of the days of anguish and 
terror, I fell in with Governor Andrew, on 
his way to a lecture of Emerson's, where he 
was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon 
his mind. An hour passed in listening to 
that flow of thought, calm and clear as the 
diamond drops that distill from a mountain 
rock, was a true nepenthe for a careworn 
soul." This is the impression which Emer- 
son's nature leaves most ineradicably on the 
mind. The serenity of his life and thought 
was a great gift to his countrymen. The 
figure which they call up to mind always has 
a smile playing about the eager features; 
the voice that they hear is modulated and 
penetrating. 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK. 

VoN^ Ranke, after turning ninety, keeps 
cheerfully on with his Universal History ; 
a score or more of learned men associate 
themselves in writing the history of a single 
American town. Which is the truer method ? 
Which produces the better results ? The 
answer depends greatly on what one wants 
of history. If it be a broad view of the 
stream of tendency, then a philosophical his- 
torian like Yon Ranke, who has the insight, 
the power of seeing the end from the begin- 
ning, the perception of ruling ideas, is the 
writer to surrender one's self to. But there 
are other attractions in historic study. There 
is the possibility of wresting from some 
limited series of events the secret of their 
cause and effect ; the ever-elusive search 
after indubitable fact ; the exercise of one's 
imagination upon the material thrown up by 
the spade of the independent investigator ; 
the tracing of the foundation upon which 
some political community has built so broadly 



172 MEN AND LETTERS 

as quite to hide from ordinary sight the 
source of its power. If one cares for history 
in this fashion, then nothing will content 
him save to get as closely as possible at the 
original documents and monuments of his- 
tory. 

There is another aspect in which history 
presents itself somewhat different from either 
of the above. It is an interesting story, not 
fabricated in the brain of some clever inven- 
tor, but worked out by some invisible power 
through the activity of real men and wo- 
men; it is a drama of persons, set upon 
the stage of the world, to be resolved into 
order by the selective power of the imagina- 
tion ; it is a succession of events, having 
now and then a denouement, only to go on 
once more in a new series. In the hands of 
a writer who has a clear sense of perspec- 
tive, the history of a nation or of an epoch 
may become luminous, and as attractive as 
the story, the drama, or the narrative, which 
deals with imaginary beings. 

Of the three methods of historical writing 
which answer to these demands of the stu- 
dent and writer, — the philosophical, the scien- 
tific, and the literary, — there can be little 
doubt that the scientific method is now at 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 173 

the front. It agrees most perfectly witli the 
spirit which dominates all departments of 
intellectual activity. George Eliot in her 
Middlemarch turned restlessly from one to 
another of her characters, in the hope of 
finding one that was built upon an unyield- 
ing foundation. Caleb Garth was the only 
one whom she heartily admired and re- 
spected. He was wont to speak of business, 
as many of religion, with reverence and a 
profound sense of its reality and comprehen- 
sive power. His character is built from this 
idea and for the expression of it. He is the 
incarnation of that consciousness of reality 
in one's self and firm fulfillment of the end 
of one's being which is the cry of Middle- 
march. The historian is impelled by the 
same spirit which drove George Eliot. He 
wishes to get down to hard pan. He is 
skeptical, not as one who doubts from choice, 
but from necessity must push his inquiries 
until he comes upon the last analysis. Hence 
the historical student of the day is after 
facts, and he is ready to put his hook into 
any unlikely dust heap, on the chance of 
laying bare a precious bit. There is pa- 
tience in the sifting of historical evidence, 
steadfastness in the following of clues, and a 



174 MEN AND LETTERS 

biofh estimate of the value of accurate state- 
ment. 

I have instanced George Eliot as an ex- 
ample of the scientific spirit, because the 
historical student joins with the creative 
novelist on one side, with the scientist on 
the other. It is impossible to exclude human 
nature from history, and the historian deal- 
ing with the concrete facts of human activity 
is sure, sooner or later, to part company 
with the physicist or biologist who is en- 
gaged upon the dissection and classification 
of facts belonging to inorganic matter, or to 
organic matter below the order of man. The 
archaeologist, groping about in the cave after 
the guttural-voiced dweller with his club 
and his little stone chips, trying to make out 
how the poor devil lived, and what he 
thought of the world into the light of which 
he had scarcely crept, may use the same 
method as his brother-worker who is meas- 
uring the wings of a paleozoic cockroach, but 
he is in a vastly wider range of human 
sympathy, and may give points to a Shake- 
speare reflecting upon Caliban and Setebos. 

The most important illustrations of the 
scientific method as applied to American 
history are undoubtedly the two cooperative 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 175 

works edited by Mr. Winsor. The general 
scheme of the two works is the same. 
That is to say it is conceded that no 
one writer is able to compass a great 
historical subject on all sides, but that the 
work of a number of writers, each viewing 
the subject from his own angle, may be so 
arranged and made interdependent as to 
form a conspectus of the whole. In the case 
of Boston, Mr. Winsor had an admirable 
opportunity for applying the cooperative 
method of historical writing. He could sur- 
round himself at once by a strong body of 
special students. More research had been ex- 
pended upon the history of Boston than upon 
the history of any other town in the coun- 
try. A well-organized and active historical 
society could be drawn upon for aid and 
advice ; there was an honest local pride to 
be trusted for substantial encouragement. 
More than this, the subject was one which 
easily permits of disintegration. There is, it 
is true, even about an American city a 
certain organic life which is capable of 
development in historic writing, and Boston 
was for a long time a very individual and 
conscious organism. Nevertheless, it is easy 
to see what limitations there are to such a 



176 MEN AND LETTERS 

view of any modern town, and how possible 
it is to resolve the forces of even so vital an 
entity as Boston into their constituent parts. 
Hence there was no insuperable difficulty 
in getting a sectional study of the town, 
especially as by the plan adopted the treat- 
ment of a topic was carried forward, volume 
by volume, through the successive periods of 
colonial, provincial, and state life. 

The eminent success of the experiment 
upon the history of Boston justified the 
confidence of the editor in adapting his 
scheme to a continental subject. The 
Narrative and Critical History of America 
is a series of monographs treating of the 
western continent. This is a long step from 
the history of one town in America, and yet 
a moment's consideration will show that by 
making his cooperative history one of Amer- 
ica instead of one of the United States, Mr. 
Winsor has simply enlarged the field of his 
historic method ; he has not applied that 
method to a different kind of subject, as he 
would have done if he had undertaken to 
prepare the history of the United States in 
this way. For America is even less of an 
organism than Boston. Whatever the far- 
off ages may show of one increasing pur- 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 177 

pose, it is out of the question for an histo- 
rian to marshal the moving forces of the 
western continent into any orderly sequence, 
with any controlling aim. The goal is alto- 
gether too far away for any historic survey 
to use it as a measuring point. 

I do not believe it would be possible to 
write a history of the United States upon such 
a plan as Mr. Winsor has adopted in these 
two great works, because a topical treat- 
ment would inevitably fail to convey a notion 
of that organic development of national life 
which is the last and finest disclosure of 
historical composition. But a cyclopaedic 
work on America, which follows the broad 
lines of chronology, is not only possible, but 
by such a treatment alone can justice be 
done to the subject. History, as told in 
this manner, will have a new charm for 
many minds, for the scientific mind is found 
in the public that reads, as well as in the 
students who explore. 

But such monumental works as these in- 
evitably suggest questions to the histori- 
cal student. The thoroughness with which 
the ground is covered, the patience with 
which the cartography has been developed, 
the careful array of authorities, all these 



178 MEN AND LETTERS 

elements give the works a solidity and im- 
pressiveness whicli both stimulate the student 
and discourage him. The foundation laid 
for historical study in an independent man- 
ner is admirable, but a cursory examination 
may well lead one to despair of attacking 
history as a study, unless he is to confine 
himself to an exceedingly minute field. 
This, I say, is the first impression likely to 
be made upon the expectant student, and if 
it warns off all merely desultory speculators 
and indolent minds much is gained. But 
for the conscientious explorer and critic 
the stimulus afforded by any stout piece of 
historical work is very great, and in the 
face of such enterprises I am tempted to 
ask what fields lie open to the writer whose 
taste leads him to specialized work, and 
whose preference is for American subjects. 
A main use to which such a cooperative 
work as the Narrative and Critical History 
of America will be put suggests one answer. 
It will serve as the index to historical ma- 
terial from which the popular writer will 
construct the story of history. It is not 
from such a work that popular ideas of 
our history are directly formed, but from 
the school-books, the magazine articles, and 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 179 

general histories. The sleepless vigilance 
of the custodians of historical material is 
the price paid for accuracy of general 
knowledge; and the work of the scientific 
student, so much of which is out of sight, 
consists largely in that critical examination 
of documents and monuments, the results 
of which, when clearly published, become 
the property of generalizing, philosophical, 
and literary historians. There is a work 
to be done, therefore, by the American 
scientific historical student, of real impor- 
tance in the preparation of thoroughly edited 
series of papers relating to American his- 
tory. The papers in the cabinets of histor- 
ical societies, the letters which have accumu- 
lated in families, the records of towns and 
states, — there is a vast abundance of this 
material which ought to be patiently sifted 
and wisely set forth. One is in despair 
before a huddle of historical material, but 
he has a fine enthusiasm for work when 
he sees that same material ordered, classified, 
and indexed. 

I look confidently for a class of critical 
scholars who shall expend unreserved labor 
upon authoritative editions of the writings 
of the men who translated the logic of 



180 MEN AND LETTERS 

events into the logic of words. It cannot be 
said that the fathers of the republic have been 
neglected. Washington, Franklin, Adams, 
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Hamilton, Sam. 
Adams, John Quincy Adams, have all been 
preserved in stately octavos ; but the work 
done upon their writings was for the most 
part done rather to preserve manuscripts 
than to give scholarly presentation. More- 
over, since the publication of these works, 
much new material has come to light both 
for completing the original documents and 
for purposes of illustration. 

Take the case of Franklin for example. 
We cannot be said ever to have neglected 
Franklin. Editions of his writings and in- 
dependent lives mark the interest of Ameri- 
cans in this wonderful exponent of his gen- 
eration, an interest which was remarkable 
during his lifetime, has never diminished, and 
is now rising on a fresh wave. But where is 
the really satisfying edition of his writings? 
It may be that the time has not come for 
it, but I please myself with thinking that 
the work will be done finally under some such 
conditions as governed in the case of Francis 
Bacon's works. In justice to Franklin two 
editors are required, one of whom shall be 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 181 

qualified to treat him as a physicist, the other 
as a philosopher, statesman, and literary ar- 
tist. Mr. Spedding's treatment of Bacon s 
Occasional Writings affords a capital illus- 
tration of how Franklin might be edited. It 
will be remembered that though the original 
literary partnership was Spedding, Ellis, and 
Heath, Mr. Spedding remained as the sole 
representative of the firm when the final 
division of Bacon's writings was published. 
His method was to print the letters, speeches, 
and miscellaneous writings in chronological 
order, connecting them with threads of narra- 
tive and explanatory comment. The writings 
afforded a fairly good survey of Bacon's per- 
sonal life, but when thus connected and anno- 
tated, they furnished a splendid Life and 
Times of Francis Bacon. This is what ought 
to be done for Franklin. The fact that he 
wrote no one great work, — great, that is, in 
volume, — that his life from beginning to 
end is marked by tracts, letters, parables, 
essays, and philosophical discussions, and 
that he was a central figure on two conti- 
nents, makes it possible to follow Mr. Sped- 
ding's admirable method to perfection. The 
occasional papers of Bacon after all gave 
only a partial view of the man ; the writings 



182 MEN AND LETTERS 

of Franklin, without classification, but taken 
chronologically, would give under this treat- 
ment the most thorough-going, continuous 
view possible of a great man and a great 
historic movement. 

By the labors of scientific students the 
foundations are laid upon which other men 
build. Von Ranke, with his colossal indus- 
try, is a signal instance of a man at once 
minute in his detailed work and philosoph- 
ical in his broad generalization ; but the com- 
bination rarely is found, and the philosoph- 
ical historian shows his indebtedness to the 
individual sappers and miners. It is a for- 
tunate thing if he admits this indebtedness 
in his own mind, and is willing patiently to 
use the labors of others. The temptation of 
the philosopher is to follow some enticing 
theory, especially if it promises to lead him 
away from generally accepted historical 
truths. Niebuhr says in one of his lectures 
that he is very suspicious of paradoxes, that 
it is the KOLvy] So^>7, the common opinion 
which is to be relied upon in historical mat- 
ters, meaning that the consensus of histori- 
ans is to be respected beyond any striking 
view which has novelty for its chief merit. 

Yet there is such a thing as a slow revo- 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 183 

lution even in common opinion, tlie forma- 
tion of a new habit of thought. Thus it was 
once the custom among American writers to 
treat American history as if it were excep- 
tional, the product of forces integral to 
American life, and independent of Euro- 
pean development. A sort of intellectual 
high tariff shut out foreign ideas, and en- 
couraged the production of native notions. 
Such an attitude has given way before the 
impulse which is sending our students to the 
search for the beginning of institutions, laws, 
and organisms. A wiser understanding sees 
that for a considerable period, indeed down 
to the close of the second war with England, 
American history was in reality a part of 
European history, and could be truthfully 
related only by a person who took his stand 
now on one side, now on the other of the At- 
lantic. A truly philosophical history indi- 
cates those undercurrents of race, law, and 
institutions which make the nexus of the 
new world with the old, and act as inter- 
preters of the later history, wrought out 
under more separate influences. 

Nor is this all. If the writer of American 
history needs to throw open his windows to- 
ward the east, it is quite as needful that he 



184 MEN AND LETTERS 

should regard the aspect of our development 
which looks away from Europe. A delicate 
illustration of this is offered in the work of 
that new school of historical writers which 
puts The People in the titles of its books. 
The late Mr. J. R. Green was not precisely 
a pioneer, but his brilliant history was so 
conspicuous an example of a mode of treat- 
ment which commends itself to the minds of 
men educated under democratic principles, 
that it has served to stimulate other writers 
and to make historical students take much 
more careful note than formerly of the mul- 
titudinous life which finds expression in the 
varied form of human activity, and to cease 
concerning themselves mainly with govern- 
mental development. The rise of this school 
is a distinct witness to the new reading of 
humanity which the present century has 
known. The growth of democratic ideas 
has given dignity to the study of the indi- 
vidual; the emancipation of the intellect, 
which is a part of the great renaissance of 
modern times, has resulted in an intense in- 
quiry into the reign of law: so that the most 
acceptable historian of to-day, the one most 
in accord with the temper of the age, is he 
who is able to detect the operation of the 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 185 

greatest variety of individual life, and to 
discover the comprehensive laws which gov- 
ern in the development of the nation. 

A country like England, where the idea of 
government by class has not so much been 
overthrown by the violence of revolutions as 
displaced by the greater energy of demo- 
cratic principles, offers a most attractive 
theme to the historian who would disclose 
the undercurrent of popular life and its 
gradual emergence into the light of day. A 
history of the English people is a protest 
against an interpretation of history which 
makes it the drama of kings, and its finest 
success is in tracing a confessed power back 
into periods when it was dumbly, uncon- 
sciously, working out its destiny. Dean 
Stanley, leading a party of working men 
through Westminster Abbey, and discours- 
ing upon the historical monuments to which 
they are heirs in common, is a fine picture 
of modern England ; but by what steps were 
the figures in the picture brought together ? 
To tell that is to tell the history of the peo- 
ple of England. 

The contrasts which such a picture sug- 
gests are abundant in English history, and 
they arrest the mind; but is there an equally 



186 MEN AND LETTERS 

suggestive theme in American history? Is 
the history of the American people a protest 
against false views of that history, which 
once prevailed ? Certainly not in so dis- 
tinct a degree as may be averred of English 
history, although the habits of historical 
writing prevalent in one country have natu- 
rally influenced and largely determined the 
same habits in the other. A recent Amer- 
ican writer, for example, strikes a note in 
the prelude to his history which betrays the 
influence under which he has worked. " In 
the course of this narrative," he says at the 
outset, " much, indeed, must be written of 
wars, conspiracies, and rebellions ; of presi- 
dents, of congresses, of embassies, of treaties, 
of the ambition of political leaders in the 
senate-house, and of the rise of great parties 
in the nation. Yet the history of the people 
shall be the chief theme." I do not believe 
that any American historian can go deeply 
into such a subject without revising his 
judgment as to the comparative unimpor- 
tance in history of wars, conspiracies, rebel- 
lions, presidents, congresses, embassies, trea- 
ties, ambitions of political leaders, and the 
rise of great parties. The ease with which 
this writer sets all these aside is a mere 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 187 

rhetorical burst, borrowed from the creed 
of the school to which he belongs. It is 
very true that in English history there is a 
people in distinction from a government, 
but no one can make an exhaustive study of 
United States history without revealing the 
fundamental doctrine that the people con- 
stitutes the nation, and that there is no polit- 
ical order external to it. No doubt this 
truth is one which grows clearer in the prog- 
ress of the nation, and yet the organic life of 
the people of the United States has always 
been an integrity ; it is merely a habit of 
mind borrowed from traditional study, which 
speaks of wars, presidents, congresses, and 
the like as if they were something foreign 
from the life of the people, or only inci- 
dental to it. There is a radical defect in 
any conception of the history of the United 
States which invests the political life and in- 
stitutions and administration of government 
with any foreign property. It is a defect 
resident in much of our political thought, 
and it is slowly wearing away from our 
political consciousness ; its last stronghold is 
in the minds of place-holders, but it ought 
to be wholly absent from the mind of an 
historical teacher. 



188 MEN AND LETTERS 

Tliere is, indeed, one view in whicli an 
author governed by sucli a notion is in dan- 
ger of missing the greatness of his subject 
altogether. The history of a nation is 
scarcely worth telling if it leave upon the 
mind the impression that an improved mower, 
or even a public school system, represents 
its highest attainment. There is a national 
life which surpasses any individual product, 
or any system which human ingenuity has 
evolved. It is in the realization of freedom, 
and has its record in public acts and the delib- 
erate registration of the public conscience. 
A bill of rights is a more admirable represen- 
tation of the life of the people than letters 
patent, and the organic unity of the nation 
has been found to mean more to the indi- 
vidual member of the nation than any well- 
ordered or comfortable life, however adorned 
by the arts and graces of civilization. It is 
for this reason that congresses and courts, 
proceeding from the people and responsible 
to them, may occupy the thought of an his- 
torian of the American people, with more 
just propriety than the same subjects may 
engage the attention of an historian of the 
English people. 

Then, if one really desires to take up the 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 189 

subject of United States history in a philo- 
sophical spirit, what large opportunities 
there are for absolutely new lines of work. 
Who, for instance, has fairly disclosed the 
meaning of racial currents ? Who has made 
clear the great migration, unsystematic, un- 
organized, yet moving with resistless force to 
take possession of western areas ? Even that 
old, apparently threadbare theme of the rela- 
tion of the separate states to the union has 
been discussed chiefly in its political and 
legal bearings. Who has yet fully grasped 
the subtler relations which find expression 
in the changing moods of political conscious- 
ness? 

There is a means of study which has fallen 
somewhat into disuse that may well be com- 
mended to those who are ambitious of writ- 
ing American history. Nowadays, a vigor- 
ous training at college and university, with 
a few terms under some German historical 
master, finds favor as a proper preparation 
for worthy historical work. But this intel- 
lectual course misses one important effect : 
it does not necessarily depolarize the mind 
and set it free from those intangible, tradi- 
tionary beliefs and prejudices which color 
the perception of life. How nearly impossi- 



190 MEN AND LETTERS 

ble it is, for instance, for a New Englander 
to divest himself of that circumambient at- 
mosphere through which his ancestors have 
been in the habit of regarding the develop- 
ment of our political life, and which seems 
to him nothing else than the clear light of 
heaven ! Association with southern or west- 
ern bred men at the university will do some- 
thing toward enlarging his horizon, but after 
all it is not reflected light, but change in the 
point of view which is most needed. 

Valentine in discourse with Proteus, who 
apparently has been urging his friend to 
stay at home, declares, — 

" Home-keepiBg youth have ever homely wits ; " 

and Proteus's uncle in like manner advises 
his nephew to set out on his travels. He 
urges Panthino to importune Antonio 

' ' To let him spend his tim.e no more at home, 
Which would be great impeachment to his age, 
In having known no travel in his youth." 

This, no doubt, was the temper which 
Shakespeare found amongst English gentle- 
men in the restless, enterprising age upon 
which he had fallen, and Bacon in his essay 
Of Travel supposes throughout the custom 
of travel for educational ends. The English 
gentleman of Elizabeth's time expected to 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 191 

take part in the government of his country, 
and he traveled abroad because government 
meant emphatically dealing with the neigh- 
bors of the nation. The American historical 
student likewise has very decidedly to do 
with the government of his country, because 
it is his special function to illuminate the 
history which must be constantly intelligent 
to the people in order that they may govern 
wisely. For him there is an immense aid in 
the habit of what may be called historical 
and political traveling in distinction from 
geographical. His closet study would be 
immensely vivified and enlightened by slow 
and leisurely journeying through the coun- 
try. Let any one write a general history of 
the United States, and he will find, if he be a 
Bostonian, that he will write of events which 
took place in Boston and its neighborhood 
with an animation and precision painfully 
in contrast with the vagueness which occu- 
pies his mind when he comes to write of the 
battle of New Orleans or the attack on Fort 
Sumter. In the one case, the whole back- 
ground is in his mind's eye ; in the other, he 
has only the diagram of a map or chart to 
help him. Beyond and above this, the his- 
torian who has been naturalized in different 



192 MEN AND LETTERS 

sections of the union will have been natural- 
ized in thought also. Bacon would have his 
young English gentleman " sequester himself 
from the Company of his Countrymen, and 
diet in such Places where there is good Com- 
pany of the Nation where he travelleth." 
The advice is commendable to the historical 
student, who is by no means free from the 
perils of insularity in thought. 

One is tempted to think that the improve- 
ments in modern thought mean a fresh start 
in all fields of literary production. It is easy 
to delude one's self with the notion that sci- 
ence and scientific methods are working such 
a revolution in intellectual life that the hu- 
man race will one of these days accept a new 
grand division of time, and antiquity will 
reach down to the nineteenth century. At 
any rate, such is the logical deduction from 
the sentiments of a good many laudatores 
temporis prcesentis. But there is one thing 
that survives all the changes that come over 
men's modes of thought, and that is art. 
How great the apparent difference between 
the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, yet 
how capable the human spirit is of appre- 
hending the beauty of each ! It is so with 
literary art, and one finds no inconsistency 



ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL WORK 193 

in enjoying Homer and Shakespeare. There 
is in art an appeal which is undisturbed by 
the conflict of reason, or by great changes 
in mental processes ; and there is an art o£ 
history which leaves Herodotus secure when 
Rawlinson has said his last word, and keeps 
Clarendon alive though scientific historians 
have been busy over documents which he 
never saw. It is in vain to suppose that 
the new era of historic research and faithful 
collation of obscure authorities, the hunt for 
the beginning of things, the laying bare of 
foundations, is to put an end to that writing 
and reading of history which is akin to the 
writing and reading of poetry, the creation 
and enjoyment of all forms of art. Only 
this may fairly be asserted : that the his- 
torian who undertakes to recite the epic of 
a nation is put under heavier bonds to be 
faithful to minor details, and will be held 
more strictly accountable for any departure 
from accuracy. He will also be relieved of 
much waste of energy by the thoroughness 
with which the way is preparing before him. 
The indexes to history, which are increasing 
in number and efficiency, will make it possi- 
ble for the literary historian to qualify him- 
self for his task as he could not before, and 



194 MEN AND LETTERS 

will help to save Mm from those false gen- 
eralizations which an insufficient familiarity 
with facts renders almost inevitable. And 
readers — there always will be readers who 
will surrender themselves to the charm which 
puts skepticism to sleep, and awakens the 
larger trust in the divine possibilities of hu- 
man freedom. 



ANNE GILCHRIST, 

There is a personality in some people 
which is brought out most distinctly by 
relations held to others. Mrs. Anne Gil- 
christ was a woman of marked strength of 
character and self - reliance ; yet her very 
individuality is most discoverable when one 
sees her, through the medium of her son's 
memorial, with her husband, with Blake, 
with her children, with Whitman, and with 
Mary Lamb. She is alv/ays herself, but 
then her self was a nature which obeyed the 
great paradoxical law of finding life through 
the loss of it. Mrs. Carlyle is quoted as 
saying, as she watched her neighbor break- 
ing up her Chelsea home for a retirement 
in the country, that Mrs. Gilchrist would 
" skin and bury herself alive for the benefit 
of her children." Comparisons are apt to 
be unjust as well as odious, and the picture 
of Mrs. Gilchrist keeping the integrity of 
her life when most completely devoted to 
the life of others is striking enough without 



196 MEN AND LETTERS 

the aid of any contrasting picture, even if 
two neighboring households readily suggest 
such a contrast. 

Anne Burrows was twenty-three years old 
when she married Alexander Gilchrist. Her 
father died when she was eleven, and she 
was left to the care of her mother. The 
family seems to have been one which held 
by the tenets of the evangelical school, and 
Anne's education was directed in accordance 
with these tenets ; but the few glimpses 
which her son gives of her girlhood disclose 
the independence of mind which was after- 
ward so marked an attribute. Apparently, 
her religious education was based upon a 
merely superficial presentation of traditional 
beliefs, and her vigorous intellect, refusing 
such nurture, took refuge in an extreme in- 
dependence. It is no uncommon phenome- 
non when the dry individualism of Calvin- 
ism, detached from the deep personal expe- 
rience which saves the creed, sends the dis- 
satisfied pupil into a richer naturalism, but 
one which has missed the profound signifi- 
cance of a common Christianity. 

In Alexander Gilchrist the thoughtful girl 
found a true companion, or, to speak more 
exactly, the husband found in his wife one 



ANNE GILCHRIST 197 

wlio could give to his nervous, eager, liter- 
ary activity the aid of a calm, sympathetic, 
and constant nature, Mrs. Gilchrist has 
sketched her husband's life in the second 
edition of the Life of William Blake^ and 
brief as that sketch is it leaves upon the 
mind a tolerably sharp impression of the 
conscientious, thorough, and minutely curious 
character to which she was so happily joined. 
She gave him, we cannot help thinking, an 
element of repose, and he gave her both an 
intellectual stimulus, and, by the legacy of 
his unfinished work and their little children, 
an occupation and purpose which carried 
her through hard years and deepened the 
forces of her nature. 

Mr. Gilchrist was an enthusiast in art, and 
a finely constituted hero-worshiper. He is 
principally known to readers by his Life of 
William Blahe, the actual composition of 
which was practically complete before he 
was cut off by sudden death, although con- 
siderable editorial labor was afterward ex- 
pended on the work by his widow and by 
the two Rossettis. Mrs. Gilchrist does not 
seem to have had any special training in 
artistic studies before her marriage, and her 
chosen literary tasks after she was done with 



198 MEN AND LETTERS 

the Blake did not lead her into the field of 
art. Her intellectual companionship with 
her husband made her quickly intelligent 
in such matters, and she followed his lead 
with confident step; but we are impressed 
rather by the large wisdom which saved 
her from a mere sympathetic pursuit of 
her husband's studies. While he was with 
her, she thought with him and worked 
with him. When he was gone, she finished 
his task carefully, with sound judgment and 
excellent taste. Then she devoted herself 
to the next interest, and lived for years 
to mould and guide her children's char- 
acters. 

Her husband's hero - worship made him 
naturally a biographer, and his fine percep- 
tion, his quick sympathy, led him to choose 
subjects upon which he could expend gener- 
ous labor; he had, as Mrs. Gilchrist says, 
a " strong sympathy with the un victorious 
fighters in the battle of life." With this 
came easily a warm admiration for persons, 
and a willingness to make himself of use to 
them. The man who would hunt with un- 
flagging zeal for everything which threw 
light upon the career of the dead Blake was 
no less ready to lend his time and fine pow- 



ANNE GILCHRIST 199 

ers of literary sceut to the living Carlyle ; 
and thus it came about that a friendly ac- 
quaintance with the hero ripened rapidly 
into an affectionate relation, and Gilchrist 
proved a most helpful aid to the historian 
in searching for portraits. The two families 
became neighbors in Chelsea, and the son 
prints interesting extracts from his father's 
journal and correspondence, in which the 
social and a little of the domestic life of 
the Carlyles is pleasantly outlined in a 
scrappy, disjointed fashion. It would not 
be fair to judge Mr. Gilchrist by the random 
notes which he made. They were plainly 
intended as pegs for his own memory, and 
some of the trivialities would doubtless have 
either been omitted altogether, or replaced 
by the fuller form which they would have 
suggested to the writer, if he had used this 
material itself. 

Nevertheless, these pages relating to the 
Carlyles help to bring out the personality 
of Mrs. Gilchrist, and it is for this that 
one is glad to have them. They show the 
young couple in friendly and natural associ- 
ation with the older and more famous people 
near them ; and though Mrs. Gilchrist ap- 
pears almost in the background, the reader 



200 MEN AND LETTERS 

is constantly pleased with tbe glimpses he 
catches of her, — womanly, devoted, intel- 
lectually strong, yet never obtruding her- 
self, and always preserving that calm, cheer- 
ful self-poise which must have made her, 
with all her privacy of life, the one person 
to whom the other three restless figures 
turned for a sense of repose and steadfast- 
ness. It was at this time, also, that the 
Rossettis were added to the circle of the 
Gilchrists' acquaintance, and both now and 
later there are pleasing expressions of Dante 
Kossetti's subdued intensity of nature. 

It was through her husband and his 
literary occupation that Mrs. Gilchrist came 
into association with these and other notable 
persons, but her husband was rather the oc- 
casion than the cause of her friendships. 
When he was taken from her, and she 
buried herself in the country with her chil- 
dren, her former friends showed in many 
ways that they valued her for her own sake ; 
and though she secluded herself, she kept 
on, as she had done before, quietly and with 
delicate discrimination, receiving into her 
life the best that presented itself. She does 
not seem to have read widely, but she was 
indifferent to ignoble literature. She did 



ANNE GILCHRIST 201 

not make a crowd of friends, but, while 
open and receptive to all, she gravitated 
toward those best worth knowing and most 
worth holding. Thus to Brookbank came 
the Tennysons, and their coming is so pleas- 
antly told by Mrs. Gilchrist in a letter that 
I give it here. 

'' I was sitting under the yew-tree yester- 
day, when Fanny came to me and put a 
card into my hand. And whose name do 
you think was on that card? If I were 
talking instead of writing, I should make 
you guess, and keep you in suspense a long 
while; but that is no use in a letter, because 
you can peep forward. It was ' Mr. Alfred 
Tennyson.' He looks older than I expected, 
because, of course, the portraits one was 
early familiar with have stood still in one's 
mind as the image to be associated with 
that great name. But he is, to my thinking, 
far nobler looking now, every inch a king : 
features are massive ; eyes very grave and 
penetrating ; hair long, still very dark, and, 
though getting thin, falls in such a way as 
to give a peculiar beauty to the mystic head. 
Mrs. Tennyson, a sweet, graceful woman, 
with singularly winning, gentle manners, but 
she looks painfully fragile and wan. , . , 



202 MEN AND LETTERS 

"But what you will be most anxious to 
hear is all that he said. Mrs, Tennyson 
having mentioned that they had just come 
over from Peter sfield, and that they had 
been there to see a clergyman who takes 
pupils, with an idea of placing their boys 
with him, when Giddy [a child of seven] 
came into the room, Tennyson called her 
to him, asked her her name, kissed her, 
stroked her sturdy legs, made Mrs. Tennyson 
feel them, and then set her on his knee, 
and talked to her all the while I was over 
at the Simmons' arranging matters. After- 
wards, when we were walking up a hill to- 
gether, he said, ' I admire that little girl 
of yours. It is n't every one that admires 
that kind of very solid development of flesh 
and blood, but I do. Old Tom Campbell 
used to say that children should be like 
bulbs, — plenty of substance in them for 
the flower to grow out of by and by.' 
Tennyson asked me how many children I 
had ; and when I said ' four,' answered 
hastily, ' Quite enough ! quite enough ! ' at 
which I was not a little amused." 

So began a pleasant friendship, which 
was confirmed when the Tennysons came to 
stay in the neighborhood, and Mrs. Gilchrist 



ANNE GILCHRIST 203 

made herself a most hospitable and helpful 
neighbor. Her letters at this time give most 
agreeable bits from Tennyson's talk, and 
unwittingly show how much the poet re- 
spected this cheerful, serene, and hard-work- 
ing mother. Hard-working indeed she was. 
A strict economy was needful, and everything 
was to be done for the children. It was for 
them that she had sought this country seclu- 
sion, and she was giving them not only the 
physical training which the pure air and sweet 
country permitted, but the careful training in 
mental power which her strong nature made 
possible. All else was subordinate ; and 
while she used her pen from time to time, 
to add to her slender income, she resolutely 
measured her strength with regard to the 
one crowning purpose of this part of her 
life. She writes to her sister-in-law : — 

" Masson has accepted the article I wrote 
last spring \_The Lidestructihility of Force^ 
in Macmillan s Magazine], And that will 
be the last thing I shall attempt for many 
a long day, as I have fully made up my 
mind to give myself up wholly to educating 
the children. I find it such a harassing 
strain to attempt two things. Bad for me, 
because to be hard at work from the time 



204 MEN AND LETTERS 

you step out of bed in the morning till you 
step into it at night is not good for any one ; 
it leaves no time, either, for general culture, 
for drinking at the refreshing fountain of 
standard literature and of music. Bad for 
the children, because it made me grudge them 
my time of an evening, when so much indi- 
rect good may be done to them by reading 
aloud and showing them prints. And after 
all they will not always be children ; and if 
I have it in me to do anything worth doing 
with my pen, why, I can do it ten years 
hence, if I live, when I shall have completed 
my task so far as direct instruction of the 
children goes. I shall only be forty - six 
then, not in my dotage. Do you think I 
am right? A divided aim is not only most 
harassing to a conscientious disposition, but 
quite fatal to success — to doing one's very 
best in either." And later she writes of 
teaching "as real hard work, and I spend 
five hours a day at it; and then the amount 
of industry that goes to making two hun- 
dred a year do the work of four or five is 
not small. However, my prime rest, pleas- 
ure, society, all in one, — what keeps me 
going in a tolerably unflagging way, — are 
the glorious walks. Hind Head is as fresh 



ANNE GILCHRIST 205 

to me as the day I first set eyes on it. And 
if I go out feeling ever so jaded, irritable, 
dispirited, when I find myself up there alone 
(for unless I have perfect stillness and quiet- 
ness, and my thoughts are as free as a bird, 
the walk does not seem to do me a bit of 
good), care and fatigue are all shaken off, 
and life seems as grand and sweet and noble 
a thing as the scene my bodily eyes rest on ; 
and if sad thoughts come, they have hope 
and sweetness so blended with them that I 
hardly know them to be sad, and I return 
to my little chicks quite bright and rested, 
and fully alive to the fact that they are the 
sweetest, loveliest chicks in the whole world. ; 
and Giddy says, ' Mamma has shut up her 
box of sighs.' " 

The familiar intercourse which Mrs. Gil- 
christ maintained with the Rossettis, by in- 
terchange of visits and correspondence, gave 
occasion for an acquaintance which largely 
colors the latter half of the memorial of 
her life. Mr. William Rossetti introduced 
Walt Whitman to the English public by a 
volume of judicious selections, and one of 
its earliest readers was Mrs. Gilchrist, who 
wrote : " Since I have had it, I can read 
no other book; it holds me entirely spell- 



206 MEN AND LETTERS 

bound, and I go througli it again and again, 
with deepening delight and wonder." Mr. 
Rossetti at once placed the entire body of 
Whitman's verse in Mrs. Gilchrist's hands ; 
and there followed a series of letters from 
her, which were a little later run into a 
consecutive article, printed in America, and 
reprinted in the memorial volume as An 
Englishwomari s Estimate of Walt Whit- 
man. Mr. Rossetti introduced the letters 
by a brief note of his own, in which he 
characterized them as " about the fullest, 
farthest-reaching, and most eloquent appre- 
ciation of Whitman yet put into writing, 
whether or not I or other readers find cause 
for critical dissent at an item here and there. 
The most valuable, I say, because this is the 
expression of what a woman sees in Whit- 
man's poems, — a woman who has read and 
thought much, and whom to know is to re- 
spect and esteem in every relation, whether 
of character, intellect, or culture. " Fifteen 
years later Mrs. Gilchrist again summed her 
judgment of Whitman and his apostleship 
in a paper entitled A Confession of Faith, 
There is, or rather was fifteen or twenty 
years ago, in England, a disposition among 
literary and artistic people of a distinct type 



ANNE GILCHRIST 207 

to construct an American phantom. The 
men and women who were at odds with the 
England of their day, impatient at smug 
respectability, chafing not so much at the 
petty restrictions of conventionality as at 
the limitations imposed by institutional re- 
ligion and politics, wishing to escape from 
the commercial conception of the universe, 
and met everywhere by the self-complacency 
of Philistinism, took refuge in two widely 
separate realities, mediaeval romanticism and 
American freedom. The one inspired their 
art and much of their poetry, the other en- 
kindled their thought. Both offered them 
an opportunity to protest against English 
lawful dullness. In America these spirits 
saw the cheerful largeness of hope, the 
confident step, the freedom from tradition, 
the frank appropriation of the world as 
belonging to Americans, and a general habit 
of mind which proclaimed law as made for 
man, and not man for law. With the ardor 
of worshippers, the more outre their idol 
the more they admired it. An exagger- 
ated type of frontier lawlessness, some som- 
brero-shadowed, cowhide-booted being, filled 
them with special ecstasy. It was not that 
they cared to go and live with him on the 



208 MEN AND LETTERS 

prairie, but he served as a sort of symbol to 
them of an expansive life which was gone 
from England, but was possible to human- 
ity. They knew he was exaggerated, that 
there were cityfuls of people in America 
who regarded him as a side-show ; but he 
brought the freshness of contrast with him, 
and so served the end of their thought in 
his way as effectively as a Cimabue did in 
another. Cimabue and the latest wild man 
of the West met in the London studio and 
drawing - room, and though they did not 
know each other had a " mutual friend." 

Thus these dissatisfied Englishmen sought 
in American literature for something new, 
something that could not have been written 
in London, and they were impatient of those 
fine shades of difference which make Ameri- 
can literature as distinct as Americans them- 
selves, and just as defiant of analysis ; they 
wished to see their conceptions of America 
materialized in bold, unmistakable shape. 
They did not ask for form, — they had abun- 
dance of that in England ; they asked for 
spirit, and it might take any shape it chose. 
So, persons whose artistic perception was 
delicately developed accepted as a fact, 
which transcended all ordinary laws of art. 



ANNE GILCHRIST 209 

poetry as huge, as floundering, as inorganic, 
as Blake's wandering visions, and like tliose 
visions shot through with superb lines, 
touched with gleams of heavenly beauty, 
suggesting waves of profound thought. Po- 
etry broken loose was what they saw and 
admired. 

There is much in the point of view, in ad- 
miration. From a London studio an Amer- 
ican wonder will have a different aspect than 
from the interior life of America itself, and 
the explanation of the apparent indifference 
which his own age and country may show to 
a poet received with acclaim in a foreign 
land may be found in the very community 
which his contemporary countrymen enjoy 
v/ith him. They see the thoughts which 
they think, and are all the while uncon- 
sciously translating into activity, rendered 
in a poetic form, which has little value for 
them precisely because it comes too close to 
their nature. They are accustomed to tall 
talk, and they treat it good-humoredly, as a 
weakness of their own. But because they 
are living freely, generously, and, if one may 
say so, splurgily, they instinctively seek form 
in their ideals of art, and demand that the 
spiritual forces which they admire shall have 



210 MEN AND LETTERS 

a completeness and precision complementary 
to tlieir own somewhat vague and unre- 
strained life. It was no unmeaning accident, 
but a clear demonstration of tliis conscious 
want, which made sculpture the first effort of 
any consequence in American art. It was 
this perfection of form which endeared 
Longfellow to his countrymen, and it is the 
delicacy of art in Hawthorne which has made 
him so representative an American writer. 

I have strayed a little from my imme- 
diate theme. Mr. Rossetti rightly congrat- 
ulated himself that so strong a woman as 
Mrs. Gilchrist should welcome Whitman, 
and no one can read her own analysis of 
this new nature which had been presented to 
her without respecting her lofty courage and 
broad sympathy. " Perhaps Walt Whit- 
man has forgotten, or, through some theory 
in his head, has overridden," she writes, 
" the truth that our instincts are beautiful 
facts of nature, as well as our bodies, and 
that we have a strong instinct of silence 
about some things." Having said that, she 
dismisses the matter, or rather proceeds to 
take up into a general philosophical coup 
d^oeil all that in the poet which individually 
or in detail might offend her. 



ANNE GILCHRIST 211 

My business is not with the poet, but 
with the woman, and my interest is in see- 
ing how boldly she uses the poet as a whole 
to carry forward her thought, to enlarge her 
conceptions of human life, and to solidify 
and define floating notions of science and 
religion which had long been forming in her 
mind. She was right, from her point of view, 
in disregarding special criticism. It was 
not whether Whitman, in this or that poem, 
had given her pleasure or offended her sense 
of propriety ; he was to her, in the sweep of 
his prose and verse, a democratic prophet, 
and as such a most welcome guide into those 
larger regions of thought whither her mind 
was tending. She belonged to the larger 
England of her day, and with a woman's 
wit and fidelity she recognized at once and 
accepted without reserve the Greatheart 
who should point the way to the city of her 
desire. Few phenomena in Mrs. Gilchrist's 
life impress me as more indicative of her 
womanliness than this strong passion for a 
book which in its ordinary acceptation would 
seem to repel rather than attract a woman's 
nature. In a large way she was disclosing 
the same noble nature which we have noted 
under other conditions. She was losing her 



212 MEN AND LETTERS 

life to find it ; she was suppressing the indi- 
vidual in her to rise into the nobler concep- 
tion of the humane life ; and in giving her- 
self so abundantly to a great idea — for it 
was a great idea which she caught through 
the medium of this new nature — she was 
enlarging and enriching her own personal- 
ity. All this I can say, looking at the mat- 
ter from her point of view, but I think she 
was wrong, fundamentally, in her philoso- 
phy ; for naturalism, however far it may be 
developed, never has accounted, and never 
can account, for the sons of God. 

I have dwelt so long on the more striking 
periods of Mrs. Gilchrist's development that 
I can only refer briefly to the circumstances 
that followed. In 1876 she came to Amer- 
ica for two or three years, enlarging her cir- 
cle of acquaintance, and as before quietly pos- 
sessing herself of the best that came in her 
way; not restlessly seeking the unusual or 
the conspicuous, but looking with interest 
and a fine discrimination upon the life v/ith 
which fortune brought her into contact. 
Naturally she sought out Walt Whitman, 
and established pleasant friendly relations 
with him. She found him fully realizing 
the ideal she had formed from his poems ; 



ANNE GILCHRIST 213 

for Mrs. Gilchrist had a sane mind, and was 
abundantly able to take care of her concep- 
tions. 

The years which succeeded Mrs. Gil- 
christ's return to England, from 1879 to 
1885, were filled with occupation. She 
wrote a sympathetic life of Mary Lamb 
for the series of Eminent Women, and some 
minor articles, and brought out a second 
and revised edition of the Blake ; and she 
moved in a circle of friends who called out 
her cheerful help, and gave her in return 
the homage of respect and affection. She 
passed through a strong grief in the loss of 
a daughter, and her own strength, which had 
been undermined by years of devotion, gave 
way at last. In the somewhat fragmentary 
treatment of the memorial volume these last 
years are not very fully treated, but one is 
incurious of petty detail. He is satisfied 
with the sketch which is left on his mind of 
a woman notable not so much for any mark 
which she has left on the literature of the 
day, though, under other conditions, she 
might well have been eminent thus, as for 
the fine portrait which she presents of an 
English gentlewoman of the new yet ever 
old school, brave, honest, hospitable to the 



214 MEN OF LETTERS 

largest thought, devoted and genuine, with 
a serene cheerfulness under circumstances 
which strain the character. Nor is one, who 
knew her even slightly, ever likely to forget 
that fine presence, the dignity which could 
bear the added title of quaintness without 
offense, the equipoise of manner which told 
of an equanimity of life. 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEAEE. 

It happens to the ingenuous traveller 
upon first visiting Switzerland to experience 
a shock to his sensibilities not many days 
after he has entered the enchanted region 
of mountains. As he climbs some gently 
ascending path, with the increasing exhila- 
ration which the upper air engenders, he is 
suddenly confronted by a gate or some other 
bar to progress, and discovers that he must 
pay a franc, or half a franc, before he can 
make his way to the one point from which a 
wonderful view is to' be obtained. He for- 
gets at once the gentleness of the path by 
which he has climbed, in indignation at the 
mercenary spirit which has prompted the 
miserable owner of this particular part of 
the mountain to levy upon the lover of the 
picturesque. He fumes inwardly and possi- 
bly sputters outwardly as he pays the tax 
and passes on his way ; the view to w^hich 
he has become entitled, of which, indeed, 
lie is now a sort of tenant, may be ever so 



216 MEN AND LETTERS 

grand, but it is vexatiously confused with, 
the meanness of its peasant proprietor. 

It is somewhat thus with our apprehen- 
sion of Shakespeare. In imagination, more 
even than in reality, access to his meaning 
seems barred by the officiousness of com- 
mentators. The host of industrious scholars 
who have opened ways to desirable points 
of view are apt to seem to us rather imper- 
tinent toll-takers who will not let us into 
the delights and mysteries of our author 
unless we stop to read their notes and com- 
ments. I suspect that for a great many 
readers Shakespeare is an enchanted castle 
thickly beset by an impenetrable hedge of 
notes which has grown up especially during 
the past century so as to render the place 
quite inaccessible. Yet along comes the 
prince, riding gayly with the ardor of ad- 
venture ; the thorns and trees divide at his 
touch ; he passes the sleeping sentinels, enters 
the palace, discovers the princess, touches 
her lips, and without the blast of horn or 
bugle, the whole world of knights and ladies, 
servants, cooks, and scullions awakes to busy, 
joyous life. It was the princely nature only 
for which these drowsy folk waited, and the 
secret of Shakespeare yields to the gallant 
mind that goes straight to its mark. 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 217 

Yet it would be a mistake to cheapen in 
our minds the work of the commentators. 
We shoukl fare ill without them, and they are 
slowly but effectively constituting a new and 
important body of literature. Let any one 
read attentively the Variorum edition of 
Othello which Mr. Furness has so patiently 
and with such fine sense of proportion pre- 
pared for the use of the student. He will 
perceive what I mean when I venture to pre- 
dict that the time will some day come for a 
new and interesting study of Shakespeare, — 
namely, the study of Shakespeare as reflected 
in successive generations of men. Acute 
minds will set themselves the problem of dis- 
covering not what Shakespeare was by him- 
self, but what he was in the consciousness of 
other men, — the men of his own time, the 
men of Pope's time, the men of Coleridge's 
time, the men of Matthew Arnold's time. It 
will be a most curious and by no means un- 
profitable investigation, for it will add to the 
fullness and accuracy of our conception of 
mankind in a growth of its consciousness, the 
last and finest result of historical and philo- 
sophical study. 

Already it is possible to indicate some 
of the broader marks of this reflection of 



218 MEN AND LETTERS 

Shakespeare in the mirror of men's thoughts. 
It has been well said that in the days of 
the Restoration when Pepys found Othello 
a mean thing as compared with the intrigue- 
riddled play of The Adventures of Five 
Hours^ Dryden was addressing the people 
of England through the ghost of Shake - 
speare. But Dryden found Shakespeare 
" untaught, unpractis'd, in a barbarous age ; " 
with all his poetic admiration for the genius 
of this great progenitor, Dryden thought it 
meet and indeed necessary to veneer Shakes- 
peare with a polish of his own. 

A crasser critic in the time of Dryden, Mr. 
Thomas Rymer reflected better, it may be, 
the comonplaces of the judgment of the time 
when he says, speaking of Othello^ " in the 
neighing of a horse, or in the growling of a 
mastiff, there is a meaning, there is a lively 
expression, and, may I say, more humanity, 
than many times in the tragical flights of 
Shakespeare." 

What more distinctly indicates the absence 
of veneration for Shakespeare in this period 
than the fact that Dryden and Davenant 
altered the Tempest in order to introduce 
spectacular effects which should catch the 
eye and ear of a public that demanded sen- 



THE FUTURE OF SEAKESPEARE 219 

suous deliglits? But this perversion of the 
purest piece of imaginative fancy wliicli the 
world has ever seen held its place on the 
stage for a hundred and fifty years. Dur- 
ing that period there were other illustrations 
of the persistent blindness with which peo- 
ple looked at Shakespeare. CoUey Gibber 
turned King John into Papal Tyranny^ and 
the drama mumbled denunciations of the 
Pope and Guy Faux for a century with all the 
toothless virulence of Bunyan's Giant Pope 
himself. Tate remodeled Lear and over- 
turned MicJiard II. into The Sicilian Usur- 
per. The earlier editors of the text, which 
began to be taken in hand near the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century, were all busy 
with trying to show what Shakespeare ought 
to have said, not what he did say ; and when 
the critics of the text, as distinguished from 
the critics of the stage, delivered themselves, 
it was for a long time on the assumption 
that Shakespeare was an uncouth, half bar- 
barous writer, an outlaw utterly objection- 
able to the rules of art, and the praise when 
bestowed was very sure to be in the wrong 
way and upon the wrong passages. Dr. Sam 
Johnson dismisses A Midsummer - Nighf s 
Dream with the words: "Wild and fan- 



220 MEN AND LETTERS 

tastical as this play is, all the parts in their 
various moods are well written." We may 
sum the whole matter by remembering that 
Shylock, one of the most pathetic figures in 
the gallery of Shakespeare, was all this time 
received with shouts of laughter. The Eng- 
lish public was as stupid in the main, up to 
the end of the last century, in its regard of 
Shakespeare as it has been to the present 
day in its apprehension of Don Quixote as 
a sort of crazy buffoon. 

Nothing to my mind so distinctly marks 
the change in the consciousness of English- 
men which took place at the time of the 
French Revolution as the attitude toward 
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists 
in literature, and the new regard for moun- 
tains in nature. Gray was a forerunner of 
the new dispensation, and his perception of 
the imaginative element resident in moun- 
tain scenery, as opposed to the dislike of 
mountains for their rudeness which his com- 
panions entertpJned, was another form of the 
same spirit which took delight even in Ice- 
landic and Gaelic poetry. The great con- 
sentaneous judgment, however, of Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, 
and lesser lights when dealing with Shake- 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 221 

speare and Shakespeare's companions, marks 
tke real revolution in English thought and 
sentiment. Wordsworth was not without 
secret misgivings as to Shakespeare, and 
Lamb was an open contemner of mountains, 
but a common judgment, divided in its man- 
ifestations, impelled them to the same prac- 
tical evangelization of the British mind. By 
a natural course, there came first the juster, 
truer insight into the nature of Shakespeare, 
and then the desire to establish his text 
upon critical, scientific principles. If the 
labor of commentators during the past fifty 
or sixty years has been more scrupu- 
lously exact, it is because there was first 
implanted a veneration for the poet. This 
veneration has no doubt been often very 
unreasoning, and there has been a disposi- 
tion to make a fetich of Shakespeare, but 
the great fact remains that in the present 
consciousness of the English-speaking race, 
Shakespeare is as firmly established, as sol- 
idly set against any skeptical misgivings 
of his greatness, as Mont Blanc itself. I 
count this a very important position for 
the human mind to have reached, since it 
releases one from the necessity of elemen- 
tary criticism, and gives the freest possible 



222 MEN AND LETTERS 

scope for suggestive and what I may call 
constructive criticism. Grant that Shake- 
speare is great, and our business is to point 
out in what his greatness consists ; our 
pleasure is to trace the form and content 
of his greatness. 

But why dwell on this simple truth? 
Was there ever a time when Shakespeare 
was not considered great ? No, there never 
was a time when single minds did not appre- 
hend his greatness, but there was a long 
stretch of time when insolent use of him 
demonstrates a failure of men, in particular 
and in general, to recognize his command- 
ing position in human art ; and I repeat 
that the universal recognition of Shake- 
speare during the past two or three genera- 
tions is both a symptom of advance in spirit- 
ual intelligence and also a prophecy of new 
movements of thought. 

I think that textual criticism of Shake- 
speare has probably expended its force. Un- 
doubtedly there always will be students 
whose habits of mind predispose them to 
this sort of work, and new and carefully 
edited texts will be published ; but they 
will owe their importance chiefly to some 
peculiar advantage of mechanical arrange- 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 223 

ment, or typographical exactness ; and a 
new reading or emendation will be discussed 
and fought over out of all proportion to its 
value, simply because of the poverty of op- 
portunity for such discussion. I think also 
that literary and historical illustration of 
Shakespeare, while affording a wider field 
and attracting fresher minds, has reached 
a point where the mass of material accumu- 
lated waits for careful sifting and ordering. 
Such a dictionary as Schmidt's indicates 
how this work of condensation and conven- 
ient presentation is going on, and new edi- 
tions of Shakespeare are likely to owe their 
attractiveness to the skill with which the 
best of this material for illustration is em- 
ployed. 

What then remains for the Shakespeare 
scholar, eager to make his contribution to- 
ward the interpretation and fulfillment of 
this great body of literature which we know 
as Shakespeare's Plays ? And what is the 
direction which the Shakespeare study of 
the immediate future is likely to take ? 

A partial reply could be made if we were 
to take into consideration a moment the 
change in attitude of the student of Shake- 
speare. While Shakespeare has remained 



224 MEN AND LETTERS 

the same for the past two centuries and a 
half, his reader has changed. Mont Blanc 
has been gladdened by sun and smitten by- 
fierce storms, and enshrouded by clouds from 
the beginning, but it is only just beyond 
the memory of men, in modern times, that 
the mountain has been to the multitude any- 
thing but a phase of nature to recoil from. 
Yet now that Mont Blanc has become popu- 
lar, in how many ways and by what various 
devices men express their interest in it. 
They climb its slippery sides, and suffer 
cold and hunger, and risk neck and limb, 
for one shivering hour on its summit ; they 
peck at it with their geological hammers ; 
they measure its crevasses ; they analyze its 
snows ; they photograph it ; they climb the 
Montanvert to see it ; they look at it from 
as many points of view as Mr. Pecksniff had 
for sketching Salisbury Cathedral ; they 
write poems about it ; and if they have not 
seen it at all, they imagine how it looks. 
There are as many Mont Blancs as there 
are educated Christians. 

Now w4th all these individual apprehen- 
sions of the mountain, it is easy to see that 
there are certain groups of mind into which 
the apprehension may be classified ; there is 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 225 

the point of view of the tourist, of the geolo- 
gist, of the artist, and all these points may ex- 
ist in the minds of a single person. But after 
we have set aside the special interest of the 
scholar in Shakespeare and have accounted 
for the taste of the philologist, the textual 
critic and the student of dramatic and poetic 
technique, there remains that large human 
interest in Shakespeare which varies from 
age to age as humanity itself changes its at- 
titude toward whatever comes within its ken. 
This change takes place in the mind of any 
one person growing from childhood to matu- 
rity. As a child, one finds a story in Shake- 
speare, and the story may even be extracted 
from the dramatic form as Charles and Mary 
Lamb have done ; in the glow of youth, the 
movement in Shakespeare, that great flow of 
action toward an appointed end, is the cur- 
rent into which one throws one's self, and 
happy is one so trained in freedom as to be 
able to abandon himself to this swift, this 
mighty tide. A little later comes the inter- 
est in persons, in the expression of charac- 
ter, in the evolution of thought, and along 
with this a keen sense of the literary art, 
the wit, the humor, the telling phrase, the 
genetic word. 



226 MEN AND LETTERS 

This is the stage last reached and always 
held by many, but there is a further inter- 
est in Shakespeare which comes to one here, 
another there, whose habit of thought is to 
find for all things transient some supernal, 
overarching, eternal counterpart of truth. 
What is philosophy but the never ending 
effort to make heaven and earth into one 
perfect sphere ? 

" There are more things in heaven and 
earth than are dreamt of in your philoso- 
phy," says Hamlet, who has had the nether 
world suddenly opened to him, to the gal- 
lant, eager Horatio, the scholar and frank 
gentleman. Let Horatio also get a glimpse 
of these mysteries, and for him the old for- 
mulas of philosophy learned in the schools 
become half empty of meaning. It is, I say, 
the effort of earnest minds to translate into 
terms of lasting import the fleeting phenom- 
ena which assail them in their daily life in 
the world. Who of such has not felt the 
desire to get far enough away from the con- 
fusion of the present to secure a true per- 
spective and see things as they really are, 
not as they appear ? Even distance in 
space sometimes affords almost the help of 
distance in time. If I were minded to 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 227 

write a history of modern America, a his- 
tory of the past twenty years, I am sure I 
should find it of real service to take my 
stand bodily on the other side of the Atlan- 
tic. The questions which crowd upon us 
now in theology, in politics, in government, 
in science, make us crave some jutting crag 
of vantage from which to answer them. 

To the mind seeking the solution of the 
great problems of human life, and asking 
for some definite expression of the problems 
themselves, there is always Shakespeare. In 
the microcosm which he offers one finds a 
miniature world just far enough away to 
permit a comprehensive study, just near 
enough to permit the warmth of humanity 
to be felt. The figures in the Greek drama 
are more sharply defined, and the action of 
human forces is more elemental ; there are 
fewer complexities to distort the judgment. 
But this very simplicity, profound as it is, 
removes the world which it reflects to a dis- 
tance from our sympathy and our practical 
thought. As an abstraction, the world of 
the Greek drama is held more firmly and 
yields to a finer logic, but we have to insist 
on the community of our humanity with it. 
It does not itself force this view upon us. 



228 MEN AND LETTERS 

The world of Shakespeare, on the contrary, 
is not another planet in our system; it is our 
very world itself, reduced by literary art to 
a form which permits the most varied and 
the closest study of a great whole. It was 
Hawthorne, I think, who said of Trollope's 
stories that to read them was to get such a 
glimpse of current English life as one might 
get of the maggots in a cheese by cutting 
through its centre. The realism of Shake- 
speare is as powerful, as vital, as that of 
Trollope ; but the moment we begin to com- 
pare the two, we discover the difference be- 
tween a realism which merely reproduces 
the external world, and the realism which is 
the instrument of an art that contemplates 
wholes, and those wholes comprehensive of 
the spirit of man in its largest reaches. 

It is the multiformity of Shakespeare's art, 
its complex illustration of human spiritual 
activity, that renders it so unfailing a re- 
source to all who would read the mind of 
humanity, and who ask for some external 
and fit presentation of their thought. No 
doubt there are those who find Goethe's 
Faust a completer and more significant ei- 
dolon of their imaginative skepticism, and 
of Weltschmerz, but it is possible that the 



TEE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 229 

nineteenth century is accountable for this 
preference, and that Faust^ for all it is so 
much of an air plant, will have a less vigor- 
ous clutch upon another century, while 
Shakespeare's plays, though rooted and 
grounded in the England of Elizabeth, will 
be read, not as antiquarian transcripts of 
an impermanent form of human life, but 
as enduring expressions of that which is 
most lasting in the human consciousness. 
Certainly, until the modern world is as far 
removed from Elizabeth by some cataclysm 
of moral forces as it now is from Pericles 
by the great fact of Christianity, Shake- 
speare will continue to reproduce for us 
ourselves and not another race of men. 

Nevertheless, there is in Shakespeare, as 
in every great humanist, that which is local, 
transient, temporary, as discriminated from 
what is universal and eternal. We go to 
the commentators for explanation of allu- 
sions which have become obscure to persons 
living in Massachusetts to-day and not in 
Warwickshire when America was a far- 
away name. Beyond these linguistic and 
social changes, however, which scarcely inter- 
rupt the course of an intelligent reading, 
there are lapses in the great forms of human 



230 MEN AND LETTERS 

society which cause us, if we are keen in 
our sense of our own relations, to read the 
plays which record Shakespeare's sense of 
his human relations with a new interest, an 
interest derived not solely from the vivid 
appeal made to us by his characters and 
their drama, but also from the light of 
contrast thrown upon our own familiar expe- 
rience. We do not, for example, find the 
least difficulty in realizing the absurdity of 
Malvolio's attitudinizing in cross - gartered 
yellow stockings, although it is doubtful if 
any base-ball team in the country ever 
thought of adopting that sign -pedal, and 
Blender's Booh of Middles does not need to 
be translated for us into Harper 8 Drawer 
before we can understand why the bashful 
swain who had no wit of his own should 
lean heavily on that which was provided for 
him by the intelligible literature of the day. 
But when the fun of The Merry Wives of 
Windsor has expended itself, and we return 
to our own social life, we find it somewhat 
difficult to reproduce not the mere external 
conditions of that drama, but the social 
ethics to be translated into the terms of our 
ordinary society. 

What a capital opportunity, by the way, 



TUE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 231 

this play offers for an ingenious study of 
Shakespeare. I would suggest as a task 
for any student in literature who wished 
at once to study the great dramatist and 
to perfect himself in the art which we all 
secretly believe we can practice, — I mean 
the art of writing a novel, — to take The 
Merry Wives of Windsor and make of it 
a novel under the title, say, of Anne Page's 
Lovers. What he would need to do would 
be to make Anne Page and her experi- 
ences the central theme of the novel, throw- 
ing Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives 
into the background, treating their adven- 
tures and larks as the occasions out of which 
Anne's opportunities spring. One who es- 
sayed this would be struck at once with the 
change of interest which has come over the 
world of men and women. To the audience 
at the Bankside Theatre the centre of inter- 
est was Sir John and the roystering ladies 
of the comedy. The figure of Anne Page 
steals almost coyly across the stage. But 
to-day the reader of the novel of Anne 
Pagers Lovers has his or her attention fixed 
upon the girl and her budding life, — the 
other figures skip about in the background 
as amusing foils and illustrations of the 
fatuous comedy of middle-aged sport. 



232 MEN AND LETTERS 

The comparison of tlie drama and fiction 
is sometiiing more than a comparison of 
forms; it looks to an inquiry into the atti- 
tude of modern civilization towards human 
life ; it tells us that there has sprung up a 
literature, immense in volume, which con- 
cerns itself with different subjects from those 
which engaged the attention of the masters 
of the drama ; that it supposes a penetration 
of society in every direction ; sinks its shafts 
through every stratum of social structure, 
in its eagerness to bring up ore from the 
lowest deposits. The extension of the novel 
into all the fields of human thought and 
action means a corresponding breadth of 
human inquiry ; authors and readers to- 
gether, sustaining this vast literary organism, 
form the central moving body of Christen- 
dom. The book read in the home has been 
added to the play enacted on the stage ; has, 
in large measure, taken its place. It is an 
idle speculation to reflect whether Shake- 
speare if now living would choose the drama 
or the novel for his form ; whichever he 
chose it is incontestible that his attitude 
toward human life would compel him to take 
into account a stage upon which kings and 
princes played but a feeble part in compare 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 233 

ison witli untitled men and women, whose 
passions, acts, thoughts, were about each 
other in their social and domestic relations 
far more than in political activity. In a 
word, the sphere of the plain man and woman 
has been enlarged out of all proportion to a 
similar enlargement of the sphere of the 
titular man and woman. To vary the em- 
phasis of Shakespeare's words, — 

" All the world 's a stage 
And all the men and women merely players." 

The absence of the democratic in Shake- 
speare is simply a witness to the limitations of 
the society which Shakespeare represented. 
It hints at one of those great silent changes in 
the constitution of humanity which will one 
day cause readers to see Shakespeare with 
different eyes from what men here and now 
look at him. The mere difference in costume 
and speech is easily corrected for us by 
diligent commentators, but a difference in 
political and social structure means a dif- 
ference in habits of thought, and no short 
and sharp footnote will make this clear; 
only the mind trained to imaginative activ- 
ity and possessed of historical knowledge 
will be able to understand and realize the 
distinction. 



234 MEN AND LETTERS 

When, therefore, we seek to clarify our 
thought upon great ethical and social prob- 
lems, and take down our Shakespeare, we 
find abundant illustration in almost every 
direction, and we cannot readily exhaust his 
capacity for illuminating our subjects ; we 
might find a quotation from Shakespeare to 
stand as a motto at the head of every edito- 
rial in every daily newspaper to be published 
to-morrow in the United States. But all 
this illustration proceeds upon the agree- 
ment of our world with the world of Shake- 
speare's time ; as we look more narrowly we 
are aware of certain tendencies on the part 
of this moving world of ours to drift away 
from Shakespeare's world. It is still within 
conversational distance ; it will long be within 
hailing distance ; it is safe to say that it 
never will be beyond communication, but the 
points of difference will grow more obvious, 
and as they thus are magnified, our con- 
sciousness of radical distinctions will grow 
more emphatic. We see all this on a large 
scale in the ever widening gulf between 
Englishmen and Americans. The Atlantic 
Ocean, which separates the two continents, 
has been contracting its space ever since 
the first Virginians rowed across its waters. 



THE FUTURE OF SHAKESPEARE 235 

The inventions of men, tlie exactions of 
human intercourse, have reduced a three 
months' dreary voyage to a six days' trip in 
a movable hotel, and yet all this while a 
myriad forces have been at work on either 
side of the ocean moulding national con- 
sciousness, and producing those distinctions 
which are hard to express but perfectly 
patent. The manifestations of character in 
literature and art afford the clearest indi- 
cations of this national distinction, and al- 
though London and Boston can almost speak 
to each other through the telephone, the 
accent of Boston in literature is more sharply 
discriminated from the accent of London 
than it was a hundred years ago. 

Of what vast moment, then, it is, that 
the world of England in its most genetic 
period should have been compressed into a 
globe of art which we may turn and turn, 
exposing one continent after another to view. 
The farther we recede from Shakespeare's 
time, the more possible it is to isolate the 
period, to see it as a whole, and thus to use 
it as a factor in thought, just as we use 
Greece. Shakespeare then will be to us as 
the measuring rod by which we shall esti- 
mate proportions. 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 072 491 5 



